skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be honest, I've always found the evidence that ancient Mexicans had the wheel rather dubious. All we have that supports this claim are small clay fired figurines that allegedly had wheels on them. The problem with the claim is that the axles would have been made of wood so they no longer exist. So all you have are some clay fired figures with 4 round disks... If they really did have wheels, then it's rather mind boggling (and rather implausible) that they didn't apply the technology to something more practical.

I think it's important to approach history/art-history of ancient cultures with a health dose of skepticism - especially ones that didn't have a written language. These academic fields sometimes promote theories that are based on rather wild speculations.
... goes to show how long ago I ordered something from them.
Read books from O'Reilly for free
Yes, but the 'bridge,' in this case, is more akin to the mayor not the mayorship.

It's more like a house blown over in a hurricane. It gets rebuilt, but the land and foundation and some other infrastructure might be re-used --it's still not the 'old house' --it's the re-built house.
I'm always looking for the catch with Amazon (from a consumer standpoint, not from a labor conditions standpoint), but there's nothing at all. They're the cheapest and the ones with the easiest return policies. They even replaced some stuff that was missing from a ripped-and-patched-up parcel that I accidentally signed off as being complete.
you might find that the accumulated cost (admin/server/people etc) might end up making that sort of service on par with amazon, not cheaper, and thus find that it is either unsustainable (can't sell at a loss), or is at amazon's price level (and so no real benefit?).
This article raises a multitude of issues.

Issue number one: The problematic ways that the prison system deals with assault and mental illness among inmates.

Issue number two: Whether the potential sentence for a crime purely involving speech, rather than actions, should be so severe as eight years in prison.

Issue number three: Whether the speech in question was Constitutionally protected satire, or a criminal threat.

Issue number four: Whether the defendant should have gotten some slack from the justice system -- i.e. why the police/prosecutors/court involved haven't determined by now that lesser charges/penalties are appropriate.

I'm sure there are more.

I cross-posted this comment from another HN submission on the same case with only a few upvotes, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5987867
I'd agree with this. I can't judge a couple that has kids out of wedlock any more than I can the married couple. The wedding is irrelevant compared to the decision to have or keep the child.
Microsoft Antitrust Future Windows 9
Here is what installations of Windows 9 might look like if more Antitrust issues keep up!
It's been a while since I've read the article, but I skimmed over it and didn't really get that vibe from it.

I felt it was more "these guys are extreme outliers in terms of software quality, but also extreme outliers in terms of process."
> It seriously limits amount of people that can use your library

Yes, it does seriously limit the amount of people that can use your library--without giving anything back.

> hopefully you are open sourcing a library because you want to help as many people as possible.

Help as many people as possible do what? Get rich by composing together a bunch of liberally licensed software to do a task and then close sourcing it. No, thank you.

I see licensing as a Hawk-Dove-Retaliator game[1] for modeling resource competition. Each kind behaves differently: The Dove never fights and always flees. The Hawk always attacks and never flees. The Retaliator only attacks if attacked. Pay off matrices describe in detail how well each kind does against the other. Dove vs. Dove both do well; they share. Hawk vs. Dove, the Hawk wins everything. Hawk vs. Hawk, the beat each other up; both lose. Retaliator vs. Dove, just like Dove vs. Dove. Retaliator vs. Hawk, like Hawk vs. Hawk.

My analogy is this: The BSD licensor is a Dove, the proprietary licensor is a Hawk, and the GPL licensor is a Retaliator. If you want to be nice but make yourself vulnerable to exploitation, be a Dove; Doves like Doves, and Hawks love Doves--it's popular. If you want to get rich, then exploit all the Doves and be a Hawk; Doves worked hard, so you don't have to. If you want to have your work respected rather than exploited, be a Retaliator: happy to cooperate with those who cooperate, but willing to punish those who defect and refuse to cooperate. Which of these strategies is stable in the long-term? See the links below for a more detailed answer, but Doves certainly aren't.

Doves may enjoy a wonderful period of peace and cooperation, but they're so easily exploited that it makes one wonder how long it will last. In a population of Doves, it's best to be a Hawk. However, a population of pure Hawks does terribly. A population of Retaliators though is nearly immune from invasion.

Note: There are many salient differences between licensing and this animal behavior model. I don't contend that it is a perfect analogy, but I think it is worthwhile for considering long term trends.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)#Hawk-Dove
[1]: http://www.oocities.org/hawkdovegame/strategies.htm
Using Bootstrap for complex design systems
Markus, what license is the content of AlternativeTo under? Have you considered one of the Creative Commons licenses like Stack Overflow?
It isn't actually all that hard. There is an API call to get the prices for each seller on an item. Not sure if that also works for Amazon as the only seller listings but you can definitely track the marketplace with it.
I thought Incan only looked after domain names?
You're right. But what bothers me is that it's poorly written, using "certified ethical hacker" in quotes like it's some underground term to be sampled with punctuation, rather than Certified Ethical Hacker with capital letters to indicate the fact that CEH is a recognized cert for technology professionals.

Of course, drawing attention to CEH could turn it into a brake rather than a throttle for people who list it among their qualifications.

Also, "next cyber 9/11"? Ugh, disgusting. I don't think accurately describing how that makes me feel is within my ability.
and as much as I hate the fact there is no Australian Amazon store.. often ordering from there is fast and still much cheaper (even with shipping) than ordering stuff here in Aus.
>All useful hypothesis are, by definition, extra-ordinary.

Not in the sense of that applies to that saying. In this context "extraordinary claim" means "claim with a very low prior probability". The saying can be expressed more precisely as "in order to upgrade to the level of expectation a hypothesis with a very low prior probability, it is necessary to make an observation of very low probability generally, but high probability given that the hypothesis is true." In other words, it's essentially just Bayes' theorem.

And by no means are very-low-prior hypotheses inherently more useful. Certainly they have more impact than higher-prior hypotheses if they are validated, but in general, a very low prior means that a hypothesis is not worth wasting time considering.

In some cases, a hypothesis can be so extraordinary that it becomes practically impossible to verify by experiment. In this case, for example, the hypothesis is so unlikely that it is quite difficult to imagine an experiment (or set of experiments) whose outcome was so unlikely that it would actually make us expect that humans were descended from ape-pigs.
Marissa Mayer has been on a shopping spree, but is there any sign of a strategy?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5732413
I think there is a lot less black magic than you think. The overwhelming majority of the time the small price fluctuations are in response to changes in the price by 3rd party sellers (the ones selling the same item in "new" condition).

just check for yourself at
http://camelcamelcamel.com/

They virtually always undercut the 3rd party - which always begged the question: why do the 3rd parties even bother trying to sell on amazon?

Actually if you think about the kind of testing you're talking about, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense from a human psychology perspective. You don't look for a camera and think: "This should cost $123.76" and anything less will be huge turn off. There are probably more drastic things at play, like if the price ends in .99 or if it's more than a hundred dollars, or maybe people don't like certain price numbers for some completely random reason.

They probably have some internal database of the average (across all inventory) of the rate-of-sales vs. the listed-price and the algo just looks for a local maximum around the price that is a bit lower than the 3rd parties.
DOE National Laboratories
This seems like a stretch for no other reason than to connect the word "hacker" to Snowden. He was admin. He didn't have to 'hack' anything.

And they don't even have his resume... The whole story consists of "Someone we talked to said they saw his resume this one time and the word 'hacker' was on it, maybe."

Fuck you, NYTimes.
Walking is a good place to start.
I would like to add that I think your article on what should be in your README is awesome! I will be making use of it for a new project of mine. I just respectfully disagree on the licensing considerations.
It's a 14% discount only thanks to the strange way pricing in the publishing industry has developed: it's a 14% discount off of an 100% markup.

For mostly historical reasons, wholesale price has become quasi-fixed at 50% of list. So in this case what's happened is the publisher has chosen to sell the book for $17.50, and the way you do that is by setting an entirely notional "list price" at 2x the intended wholesale price. But the $35 is not a real price; the real price in the publisher-bookstore exchange is $17.50. It's then up to bookstores how much they want to mark the book up above $17.50. Here, Amazon is choosing to sell it for a 70% markup above wholesale, whereas previously they were selling it for a 30% markup.

(This is U.S.-specific; list prices mean different things in different countries. Also, I believe the 'standard' ratio of wholesale-to-list varies in some categories, e.g. it's different for textbooks.)
It probably doesn't help that news reports like this associate his hobbies with "major sex crimes".
Let's look at it from another perspective.

Why are 20 somethings without jobs, with minimal face-to-face social skills, average to poor grades and therefore minimal career prospects, confined to their homes when a hyper-competitive, youth loving, cute/adorable/flashy/shiny-thing loving society awaits them outside?

When the alternative is to be involved in the antithesis of your own persona, I can imagine why the slightly less horrifying self-imposed withdrawal is still more attractive than the slightly more horrifying "outside". Despite the blatantly obvious effect it may have on your life.

Source: 2 Close pals in Shiogama living together (one who had to deal with the other's hikikomori ways).
Broken social networking websites and YouTube clones are relatively harmless, so that philosophy makes sense.

Broken cryptography can cause loss of money, infrastructure, and life. Imagine if a group of dissidents where to start using this program, the crypto implementation was subtly wrong somewhere, and they were disappeared by their government early one morning. Imagine if some transmitted a password through what they thought was a secure chat, and that password led to an industrial control system for, say, a subway, water treatment plant, foundry furnace, or explosive chemical storage tank. Software doesn't just move Tweets. There are massive, hot, high-voltage, fast-moving objects controlled by software also. Letting people believe information is safe when it isn't can have very real consequences.

Unless it is obviously written all over your software that "THIS IS A TOY AND YOU SHOULD NOT EXPECT IT TO ACTUALLY KEEP ANYTHING SECRET," your obviously and embarrassingly broken crypto (to a crypto expert) might look just fine to a nontechnical user with dollars and/or lives riding on your product.
This is like the Platonic HN comment. Person hears about an interesting problem in another field (yeah, the ship of Theseus is actually interesting. That's why people still discuss it), asserts the solution after having thought about it for two minutes, then provides a useless analogy. Good work, you solved the problem! All those philosophers can quit their adjunct professorships and go bootstrap some social web companies now.
As a veteran programmer (20 years now, pretty much everything out there), I spent a couple of days with Node to see what all the fuss was about.

I walked out with 'meh' after working out I can shift more requests with asp.net and the tooling was better on asp.net as well.

Node looks good on paper but the new approach and scalability is pointless when you're losing perhaps 1-2% of a request on your web server and framework and actually having to do some work in the back end. JavaScript sucks for that and so does node's async model.

Node just makes stuff harder.

Not for monotheism either which is why you can swap asp.net, java EE or python/flask with the above and I'll say the same.
Hikikomori might be a Japanese term, but its not a Japanese phenomenon. I know dozens of my American friends who do the same thing -- hide from seemingly unprecedented expectations and similarly daunting odds, hide from society in alcohol, in television, in dual 2560x1600 monitors, even in exercise.

(My room was video games, and I'm glad I found the doorknob.)
Though I'm not sure I agree that a counter terrorism task force should be in any way connected to investigating Occupy protests without credible and specific threats of real terrorism, here's an even better example of the misuse of powers against terrorists:

When defending the liberty of unsavory characters, I usually write of my native England. Not this week, alas. In the state of Texas, a 19-year-old man named Justin Carter sits in prison, ruthlessly stripped of his freedom for making an offensive joke. After a Facebook friend with whom he played video games described him as “crazy” and “messed up in the head,” Carter replied — sarcastically, one imagines — “Oh yeah, I’m real messed up in the head, I’m going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts.” He added “lol” and “jk” for good measure. For this he was arrested by Austin police, charged with making a “terroristic threat,” and thrown into prison. He may languish there until the start of the next decade.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352432/free-justin-car...

I imagine half the male population of the US could be jailed for making similar remarks at some stage in their life.

If you give police special powers against terrorists, gradually all suspects will be considered a terrorist, because it's just easier that way. Recently a 19 year old boy has been jailed for years for one sarcastic comment, in the name of fighting terror.
I would not call living in constant fear of a federal raid "just fine" and the aggressive rezoning practices that many medical and fully legal cities use against dispensaries are questionable at best.
There is a basic impedance mismatch between the 4th and what technologists want the 4th to mean, which is this: even a liberal interpretation of the 4th amendment still characterizes it as a protection of privacy, but what the NSA is doing isn't an invasion of your most intimate private information so much as it's a potentially scary gathering together of information that isn't really all that private but could be harmful by virtue of aggregation. The 4th amendment speaks in terms that are deeply intimate: your "person" and your "house" and your "papers." It's talking about your coat pocket and your desk drawer, places that nobody has access to except for those closest to you. But the row over the NSA's activity is about information that literally hundreds of people (people who you have never even met!) at AT&T, Google, Facebook, etc, have access to. The fear is not people seeing information that was not meant for other eyes to see, because as a matter of fact we voluntarily expose that information to hundreds of other eyes, but rather the government aggregating information that could be abused.

I think the impedance mismatch is most clearly illustrated when you try to apply the text of the 4th amendment to something like the NSA getting call detail records from AT&T, or search histories from Google. The 4th amendment very clearly refers to "their... papers." To this English speaker, it strains the definition of "their" (i.e. "your's") to say that some electronic record that AT&T or Google generated that you never even had access to much less actually possessed is nonetheless "your" private paper or effect. It doesn't make any sense at all.
Thanks to my tiny phone screen, I accidentally downvoted you. Sorry. I agree entirely. Have two upvotes for other posts.
> In the US the rich pay taxes for schools they end up with better schools in their neighborhood. And they get better parks, and better libraries and better everything in rich neighborhoods. Very little of that money ends up improving poorer neighborhoods, so in the US rich people pay those taxes mostly to themselves. The taxes aren't very re-distributive, which defeats the point of progressive taxation.

And Americans wonder why their school system sucks? Why they have more people in prison than China?
Did anyone else notice the "?reposting" in the URL? It looks like someone else submitted this 8 hours earlier (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991503).
If they are actually a magician a dismissive critic would hardly prevent them from 'saving' everyone from anything.
I'd argue that the real issue here is not Amazon reacting to less competition, it's Amazon reacting to less demand for printed books. I suspect ebook pricing is still as sharp as ever, and that the affected authors should be looking at their format and market.
Amateurs beat Hollywood to make first Edward Snowden movie
Is this what http://camelcamelcamel.com/ uses?
The language of the 4th amendment is anything but cut and dry. What the heck exactly is an "unreasonable search" versus a "reasonable search?" It's hard to think of a wigglier, more context sensitive word than the word "reasonable" and that word is at the heart of the 4th amendment.
I certainly am excused when we don't have proportional voting, coalitions are used to keep the major parties in power and I don't vote anyway because I do not wish to be responsible for what the government do which is never what I have voted for. No UK party had ever kept to their manifesto - they all serve the same masters: corporations and banks.
Yeah but this is a guy who is selling a guide on deploying Node.
Is there actually less demand for print books? According to Amazon, print book sales are still growing.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/pu...
I agree with your overall premise, but anti-trust law is far broader in scope than monopolization. Indeed, there's nothing about anti-trust law that forbids a monopoly, and there's no specific market share requirement.

Market share is but one market-power consideration when the government looks at whether a company has caused harm.

There are several angles to anti-trust, such as collusion and predatory pricing, that can matter even at modest market share points, if the government can prove consumer harm.
That fricken web browser. I had to resort to sticking hacker news and a few others in my hosts file pointing back to 127.0.0.1. (On xp)
You certainly could, but this trades off fill cost against polygon count. I.e. you're using more complex calculations per-pixel for a smaller number of per-vertex/per-polygon computations.

It'd be interesting to look into the question empirically of whether this optimization would be worthwhile.

Also it depends somewhat on the specifics of the application. Two factors come to mind:

(1) Draw distance (drawing many faraway polys that are only a few pixels on-screen probably favors poly-count reduction more)

(2) Extra pixel shader complexity. If you're doing fancy per-pixel stuff with lighting or shadows or whatever, your optimization should become more attractive, because starting with your optimization and adding that extra stuff reduces the percentage of the per-pixel computation that's spent on your optimization.
I have a hobby of keeping an eye on and occasionally critiquing 'cult of personality' types who build cults and scam their members. I am passionate about it, however I've never had contact with Mr. Bogue.

I believe the guy is dangerous. Take it as you will.
It's a zero sum game. If you won, someone else didn't. Period. Rectify it how you want; it's reality.
I think he's dangerous and posturing these posts to build a new following to replace the last one that he destroyed. I would quite like to keep the HN community out of it.

Fortunately having a weak point in an argument doesn't nullify the whole thing.
Not a Snowden fan in the least but ignoring the fact that CEH certification is "highly valued" for quite a few DoD jobs (http://www.eccouncil.org/Support/dod-8570), this reeks of attempting to write off terrible access controls and oversight on whatever network he had access to by pinning it on those terrible "hackers".

I am sure these hackers are going to need to be dealt with using new invasive legislation, right? So frustrating.
I have (and I just did again). Maybe I should give it more time to warm up to it?
If I can't get a slashed zero deja vu sans mono, I will just have to buy a hi-res screen so the zero dot is less ugly (should do anyway).

So, before submitting, I found a slashed version (saved) and I am now happy! I forget source, but can email to people who want.
> The 4th protects against search of those effects by the govt. without a warrant. What do you think the computers that store and index those things are doing, without a warrant?

You're pretty conveniently leaving out several important words, and also ignoring the ", and" between the first and second clauses of the amendment.

1) You left out the word "unreasonable" from "search." The 4th amendment doesn't protect against "search of those effects" it protects against "unreasonable" searches thereof.

2) You left out the word "their". The 4th amendment doesn't protect against searches of effects. It protects against searches of your effects. You might reasonably say that a Word document on your hard drive is your effect. It's a little harder to say that a Word document on Google's hard drives is nonetheless your effect. I think it strains the definition of the word "your" to say that Google's records about what you search for, or AT&T's records about who you call are your effects, rather than AT&T's effects, when you didn't generate those records and indeed when those records were never even in your possession.

3) Searches don't necessarily require probable cause. The ", and" separates the two parts of the sentence. Searches must be reasonable, and also for any search that requires a warrant, the warrant must be supported by probable cause.