skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started with emacs in the mid 1980s and have never used any other editor unless I had no choice. Even when I've worked on ASP[.NET] projects I would still edit code in Emacs and use Visual Studio for builds, VSS integration, and managing the project metadata.

I can sympathize with some of the arguments the author makes. I don't like autocomplete or "IntelliSense" as I feel it's a crutch and if I rely on it I don't really learn the language syntax or libraries I'm working with.

I find that grep, awk/sed, and emacs functionality are adequate to refactor.

I would find an editor like Notepad way too limiting however... it just doesn't offer enough efficiencies in basic text editing. Though I have known good programmers who used it as their main editor.
Lol, I tried emacs for a couple of months but went back to vi.

I understand the broad strokes the author was applying, but it's missing the point. Modern IDE's make everybody more productive so bad programmers produce more bad code, but good programmers also produce more good code.

Overall, software quality is far better than it was 20 years ago and there is more of it.
True. But do any civilized countries exist?
I really hope President Obama reads this.
Scientists are not split on those issues. Uneducated people disagree with the scientists. Big difference.

If economists have a handle on things, why did the IMF have to apologize to Greece for giving them bad advice? Why did the Black-Scholes Model fail?
A coding app for iPad http://twolivesleft.com/Codea
Yeah, the things they are up to are bad. There's another thread on HN right now about Palantir's involvement with mobile license plate readers and the extent to which these are photographing and tracking the movements of tens of millions of people without warrant or cause and feeding the results into intelligence fusion centers. The article below notes the case of a security consultant who filed a request for his own info and found he had been photographed 112 times by just one of these programs, including one photo that was a photo of his daughters in the driveway of his own house, apparently taken by cameras installed on randomly passing police cars which just scan in everything they see and feed it to computers for analysis.

http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=35851

http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-polic...

Anonymous got a lucky break and found out about what was really going on at a few of these firms. There are a lot more firms and it isn't going to be so easy for grey hats to break in and release documents in the future. This doesn't mean that these firms aren't still engaging in widespread programs that make the Stasi look like a child's birthday game.
Attacking Crypto Phones: Weaknesses in ZRTPCPP
There's another interesting article that says--actually, it's all about the price of cocaine: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/11/co...
Austrian economists will beg to differ.

The problem with those studies is that it's cherry-picking economists. Who cares about concensus? The measuring stick should be how correctly they can predict future events.
Accounts could be NOINDEX until they are a certain age or get to a certain # of images, and then they get reviewed by hand. You can review by hand using crowdflower or mechanical turk - it's pretty easy to show the first 20 pictures (or whatever) in small, and have a large button. You can optimize the interface to make it very fast, as well.

Flickr did this for a very long time, IIRC.
Because fighting should be the last resort. If you are persevering enough, then diplomacy is enough to resolve most conflicts of interest. Way cheaper and nicer than warfare (and maybe more successful). The "problem" is, it's boring and compromises might come across as bending to the other's will (even though it's not).
Why do you want a government so much?
The Mob and Angela Clemente
But a US citizen's rights are not derived from the Constitution. It's clearly hypocritical to say a German has no natural right to privacy. We could declare war on Germany, then we could morally justify violating their rights.

But we can't pretend they have no such rights. And I'd contend that this does violate the US organic law, although this is a minority opinion. It depends on how you define "all men" and rationalize the fact that every human right existed before any government ever did.
I don't. Unfortunately, most people do, and I'm a pragmatist at the end of the day.
"Lost" implies some kind of regression. The truth is that economics has always been exactly the way the author describes. The economy is full of human actors who are irrational, who act based on their expectation of how others will act, and many of whom study economic theory and follow the pronouncements of economists.

Imagine how difficult astronomy would be if stars adjusted their spectra according to their anticipation of spectral trends, which was informed by emotion and by their reading of physics papers. Now imagine astronomers beaming spectral fashion magazines at the sun and being held responsible for skin cancer rates and crop yields. Imagine interest groups representing growers of different crops at different latitudes, as well as sunscreen industry groups, all beaming their own spectral fashion magazines at the sun. If that were the case, I doubt physicists would have had enough confidence in their understanding of the solar spectrum to deduce the existence of a new element from it [1].

[1] http://www.universetoday.com/53563/who-discovered-helium/
Switch Active HipChat Account on Mac
Yes, this conversation motivates me a lot
Not true.
1) Is gets a lot harder and more expensive to collect taxes when you have to conduct audits
2) It is impossible to collect the inflation tax
3) It's easier to control people when you can close down or freeze their bank accounts for any reason you like.

Bitcoin offers a lot of freedom at a price of learning a little bit about the technology.
I am glad the details are back up. Dowd took them down for a bit to give some vendors extra time for remediation. But the details were available on a ton of other sites so I am curious how much good came from the temporary removal of the writeup from the author's site.
True long-term energy efficiency is only guaranteed in proof of stake models like PPCoin (http://ppcoin.org/).
Strictly, we don't actually know BQP is more powerful than P, right?
Writing (testable | maintainable | scalable | rock solid) JavaScript
In most places a physician has to sign a death certificate for every death. The physician can either be the attending physician when the patient died during care or a medical examiner otherwise. The death certificate often has a place for "cause of death", and it's the medical examiner who officially designates a homicide. So it's hard (though certainly not impossible) for homicides to disappear from the records entirely.
A good programmer will contribute to writing good code. A bad programmer will not.

A good editor will help a programmer do what the are going to do already, quicker and more accurately. A bad editor will slow progress and amplify error.

If you think that you need a barrier to impede your ability to get things out of your head and into reality to prevent you from slipping out garbage then I think you are just a bad programmer.And not just because you cant pound out the correct solution on the first try but because you think you can if you just think about it long enough. Any writer will tell you the key to writing is just write. Get yiur ideas out and on to paper. Fix them later during editing and revisons. And coding is just like writing in that sense. Get your code into the editor then revise, improve and optimize. Most of all let your editor help you do these things.
And in two sentences after your excerpt, it says it's closely related to the push for popular sovereignty. This "higher ideal" that the American and French Revolutions prided themselves on is called the Citizen. Let's not forget we were serfs living before this in a time of oppressive monarchies and a very corrupt and powerful Catholic Church.
im sorry. no amount of wise investment is going to solve peoples money problems if your not earning enough.
15-year-old girl invents flashlight powered by the heat of your hand
The Wonderful Power of  Storytelling (1991)
Twitter Vine users fall after Instagram video launch
"It is a web based game and uses Javascript, there isn't anything specifically wrong with that. Why is it objectively superior to have distributable binaries that have to be compiled or ported for each architecture and OS? What is the fundamental advantage here?"

First, I much prefer open-source games, where I can see the code. So I would avoid binaries. And whether an app I use needs to be recompiled for some operating system other than the one I use is really not my problem.

Second, I loathe the move to making everything accessible only through the web, usually through bloated, insecure web browsers and crappy web technologies. If 99.9% of the web died tomorrow, I would be overjoyed. This includes virtually everything done in Javascript (not to mention Flash).

Third, I've yet to hear of an exploit of a standalone Interactive Fiction engine, while Javascript browser exploits are a dime a dozen. I prefer not to make my browser more vulnerable by running untrusted, unnecessary Javascript code.

Fourth, I don't want to be tracked through spyware like GoogleAPI, thank you very much!

"Honestly, aside from not making a point in your initial comment you chose to make it in an unnecessarily snarky manner. Completely uninteresting and irrelevant to someone saying "hey check out my game"."

Except that developers did find it interesting. Like the following comment from sillysaurus[1]:

As a game developer, I care. Any sign that my potential audience is
cut by a technology choice I make is valuable information to me.

And my comment clearly generated a lot of discussion, so I feel I made a positive contribution.

"If you don't want to check it out, then don't, it isn't necessary to share that non-information with the rest of us. I'm sure most of us (as I can see from the extended comments on this here) would have been more than happy to have a reasonable discussion on the pros and cons of browser based distribution of applications if you had started there instead of where you did."

I should have gone in to more detail as to why I am opposed to running Javascript in my browser, and why I prefer to run standalone apps rather than web-browser apps. And had I seen the gigantic backlash that my little comment generated, I would have -- had I not gone to sleep immediately after making my comment. So I'm replying now that I'm awake. I hope my current comment helps clear up why I made my initial (all too brief and snarky) comment.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5961281
I think the author's point is that economists are split on one of the most important issues. In that sense, it's not unlike physicists being split on the relative value of string theory. The only difference is that the economic issue is politically charged, so the tribal forces unsure the split endures. For physics, there are strong bandwagon incentives for everyone to do the same thing, so you swing from a huge multi-decade investment in an untested theory, to a complete vanishing of strings jobs.

In both cases, it's not the fact that something is unknown that's the problem. It's that smart people can't come to a Bayesian agreement, so it's a flag that people are being massively irrational.
Ecuador should grant Snowden asylum, but even more Obama should pardon Snowden. Sign that petition (https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snow...), if you haven't, whether or not you sign this one.
We already have a free speech zone in the United States. It stretches roughly from Maine to southern California, Florida to Washington state, and North Dakota to the border with Mexico, with a some outliers like Hawaii and Alaska thrown in for good measure.

The recent federal governments may not respect the constitution, but their violations of the very document they swore to uphold don't eliminate our rights. We need to remind them of that fact.
You mischaracterize the disagreement. Scientists disagreeing with each other is not the same kind as anti science derps claiming that global warming is a conspiracy. Climate scientists, for example, can agree that the planet is warming, but they can't agree on whether it is warming at a 12C/century rate or a 1C/century rate. Most estimates fall somewhere in between, but the range of disagreement is HUGE in terms of impact and policy response.

And he is right...economists agree on plenty of policy matters. That they disagree on some of the major problems of our time is not a problem witn the field. Disagreement on major problems is a tautology.
I'm one of the people that thinks that IDEs are a language smell. And yeah, boilerplate smells too.

But keeping the language constant, I agree with the GP. Yeah, good programmers refactor code on any environment (grep is great), but when it's easier, a good coder has more time to think about what he's writing, instead of wondering if he let any instance of a variable pass with the wrong name.
If you write too much code because your editor makes it easy, you're a bad programmer. Period.

Good programmers detest redundant code and seek to reduce it regardless.

Maybe this guy used too many code generators or something. Regardless he is way off.

Good editors make refactoring easy, which encourages refactoring. And what's wrong with calling a method from lots of places? That's what methods are for.

Good editors also reduce typos and cognitive load, both of which contribute to faster, higher quality development.
Yeah, but Austrian economists are a tiny minority, and were much tinier before January 2009. The political/media system gives them 50% weight, not the success, or lack thereof, of their ideas.
Practically speaking, context matters in privacy. For instance, if a person invades my privacy to learn my sexual orientation, I would feel violated. But if that person was my boss, I would feel much more violated.

For an American like myself, domestic spying is scary for the same reason. The US government is my local government. They run our children's schools. They make me send in reams of silly tax documents. They make me wait in line at the DMV. They patrol the streets of my neighborhood with guns. When I call 911 (the emergency number), it's the US government who answers. In short, the US government -- my government -- is in a great position to abuse the knowledge gained from spying. It's this immediacy that heightens fear of domestic spying.

Another thing to note is that there is a subtle but important distinction for Americans between the CIA and the FBI. The connotative equivalent of the FBI is the police and the connotative equivalent of the CIA is the army. Thus, watching the CIA spy on Americans feels ominous and sinister. It's the spying equivalent of martial law.

What Americans don't realize, I think, is that for foreigners it is an issue of respect. That is, the underlying context of domestic spying outrage is that US citizens were _not_ outraged by foreign spying; that it's perfectly acceptable to spy on the foreigners as long as we protect our own privacy.

In the end, privacy is about perception. To those who, like me, feel their privacy is being violated, please continue to make your feelings heard, both inside and outside the US. The more voices (especially tenacious ones) the better.
After Fighting Mobile Trend, Intel Now Embraces It
What a lame article. I don't even see what the point is. It's just random whining that people in a certain field don't know all the answers. There wouldn't be much point in studying economics (or anything, for that matter) if all the problems were solved and everybody knew all the answers.

There was an article on HN just the other day about Voyager 1 entering some unknown region of the universe. The physicists involved had no idea what was going on and all of their predictions turned out to be incorrect. So why no whiny article titled "Physics is a Lost Field"?

Macroeconomics is hard. It's nearly impossible to perform experiments validating large scale macroeconomic theories. If there were a way to accurately test the impact of the government borrowing and spending money, then it would be carried out. But realistically there's no feasible way to do that.

What's more, the author doesn't propose any solutions. Anybody can say this or that is screwed up. But that doesn't help anything. I'm sure the econ world would love to hear his theories that unquestionably solve the problems once and for all, but of course he didn't offer any.

Also, his mention of Freakonomics has me doubting his understanding of economics. The sumo example he mentions is a pretty straightforward application of microeconomics. He then goes on to say, "Freakonomics is, however, silent on monetary or fiscal policy." Monetary and fiscal policy are macroeconomic concepts. Economics is about making decisions and choosing between alternatives - how will people spend their money, what will they choose in this situation, etc. There's more to econ than just growing the national economy.
Privilege can only be granted, rights can only be seized.

The reverse is the cost of complacence.
Are 14 online photos worth $2.1 million?
Apparently a NY Times photographer thinks so and has sued Perez for using his photos without permission.

I can understand the lawsuit and the infringement upon the photos by slapping on watermark.

But $2.1 million?
These "Rights" are unalienable.

They are in alienable. That is to say, incapable of being separated from the individual possessing them. Literally, they cannot be alienated (separated) from the person possessing them.

Your real property (home, money, possessions, even spouse, children, or other family) may be taken from you and given to someone else.

The word inalienable refers not to rights which may not be taken, but which can not be taken.

You may be deprived of these rights, but nobody else can take possession of them.

It's a subtle difference, and one few people understand, particularly in the context of natural, civil, or universal human rights, which can be argued to have a moral or socially beneficial basis, but may still be alienable.

There's also a fair amount of debate over the self-evidence, alienability, and/or naturalness of these rights. Of of their status should they become so (say, through technology).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_rights
First impression: Excellent. I see you got some inspiration from a certain Userscript and I applaud you for your choice. You managed to save lots of whitespace.

I have only one criticism with the UI. You removed the toolbar normally found in the end of each feed item. This is aesthetically pleasing but it introduces a couple of usability issues:
1) I sometimes accidentally click on an item and want to keep it unread, but the 'Mark as Unread' button is unavailable.
2) In full view, the only separator between feed items is a thin grey line. Please make it thicker and darker.

I have noticed a problem with all Readers that I hope you could address. Some XML's only show the latest item. If the reader doesn't update quickly enough, it would miss some items. I would appreciate it if you somehow made your reader update these problematic feeds more often.

Edit: When I click on an item to mark it as read, the only indication my click registered is that the unread count becomes reduced by one. Please show more prominent indication that the item is read.
Backwards or forwards, my interpretation is less an oversimplification than the parent.

It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it's citizens, or that these citizens yield these rights to the Russian government. Nevertheless, according to the morals listed in the DoI, the US government is founded on the belief that Russians have these rights, because they are human beings.

The distinction one must make based on my interpretation is that the US may believe that Russians have those rights, but it is not the US Government's responsibility to secure them, especially if doing so would conflict with the objective of securing the rights of its own citizens.

The Government's first duty is to its citizens, and it's the duty of citizens to hold its government accountable. It is, therefore, not the least bit surprising to see a different reaction between the idea of a government spying on others versus spying on citizens.

I also did not bother to question the relevance of bringing in Geneva convention arguments into a discussion about surveillance and privacy. If you examine carefully, you'll discover that the Geneva Convention deals with issues of life, liberty, and happiness quite directly in the sense of execution, imprisonment, and torture. Privacy, meanwhile, is a right derived from the US Constitution and not one of those alluded to in the Declaration.

Nowhere do I say that you can't argue that a Government should uphold basic rights of all humans everywhere regardless of citizenship. What you can't do is trot out the first half-phrase of the Declaration of Independence, highlight one example of a legal argument that a non-state entity had flagrantly violated terms of a convention and should not enjoy its benefits, and somehow try to connect that to Americans being really pissed off about being subject to a large surveillance program by their own Government.
*were :P
But I want to be a rocket scientist...
Can someone summarize the video? I am curious to learn more but I don't have 45 minutes to spend on this... Thanks!
As someone who will use it every day I don't mind a small fee at all.
If the combat dialog and the post-combat dialog were spatially distinct, it would alleviate the primary problem. "stabslashstabslashstabslashstabslashleave.... nooooooooooooo!"

If the combat action buttons didn't self organize, but rather sat in the same spot (perhaps in order of discovery?), then combat frantic clicking could be consistent.

Also, sometimes the tooltip that shows the cost of a "shoot" hangs over the "eat meat" button, leading to unclickable death if you're almost dead. Clicking the tooltip doesn't shoot, nor does it yield increased health. Either behavior would be preferable to nothing.
Secret Court Declassifies Yahoo’s Role in Disclosure Fight
RSS Roundup
No. I prefer open source games. You are aware that they exist outside of web browsers, aren't you?
Papers and essays that every programmer should be aware of
To be fair, it used to be.
I know this has been beaten to death here, but I am starting to see a disturbing trend coming out of US policing/justice system. That trend is the laying on of multiple charges when someone pisses off the authorities.

It's one thing when the federal prosecutors do it (Swartz, Brown et al) and now even low level enforcers are doing it.

Is this what I have to look forward to if I ever return to the country of my birth? I cross the road at the wrong time, the arresting officer takes a dislike to me and adds 3 extra charges to the jaywalking charge which ends up with me spending 3 years in prison because I was running late for an appointment?

I've tried to stay out of these HN NSA and other political stories, but there is one thing I've noticed as a business consultant: the attitude and beliefs of top management always end up filtering down to the rank and file employees.

Is this what is happening to the US justice system? Will you one day walk into the local DMV get into an argument and end up with 15 (technically correct) charges against you, bankrupt and in prison?
http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

We all have families here.
"I've yet to have a js-based security problem."

You mean you have yet to become aware that your browser has been owned through some Javascript exploit.

Somehow that isn't very comforting to me.
I just had occasion to use mysqldump --no-data a few days ago, and then came across this today. Not a good feeling! C'mon, mySQL devs ... fix it already.