skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, so presumably you have enough of a religious background to argue from the viewpoint of your opponent. There are advantages to that approach but also disadvantages.

The advantage is that, if there is any claim to rationality in your opponent's view, you can use it to build a bridge to alternate viewpoints that they'd never normally consider. It can be very persuasive.

The downside is that this persuasiveness can be so strong as to feel invasive. That can provoke an angry reaction; in some countries it could endanger your life. There's a reason that several religions prescribe harsh punishment for apostates: someone who has left a religion knows enough about it (and about what they see as its shortcomings) to be dangerously good at 'leading others astray'.

In addition, by arguing from their axioms you are implicitly accepting large parts of their viewpoint which they can then use against you. For example, any sufficiently persuasive argument against Christianity from a Christian viewpoint can be met with "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." Why should they trust someone who seems to acknowledge Christianity as true, only to argue against it? Surely only someone on the side of the devil would fight God while acknowledging his existence.

And once they've labeled you as being on the side of devil, the more persuasively you argue, the more sure they'll be that they're right ... and that you're just deliberately lying to lead them astray.
Ruby/Rails.
Does nobody else like like straight up C++? When I was young I enjoyed BASIC languages, but ever since graduating middle school I've been a C++ guy. I love the intricacies of the language and crazy things you can do with it, and still get a huge amount of satisfaction out of being able to write really simple code that does really complex stuff.
IPython is fantastic. I'm working through project Euler with Python, IPython and notepad++. I work with C#, asp.net during my day job. While C# is a great language and the .net framework is the most sane API I've ever used, I was able to do some of the Euler problems in one, easy to understand line.
I now do a lot of stats for my work (I'm a psychometrician), and as such, people see me as being good at math, but in school, I was a mess.

Here is the problem with math education: The way we teach it guarantees that only those with a cognitive predisposition to it will develop an interest. Math is just a tool. You can use it to do all sorts of really cool things, but you never even get to see those things in school. What you see is an entire evening shot solving quadratic equations for no reason whatsoever.

I actually enjoyed geometry and trig, and the former is still useful many times a year. I also enjoyed physics, which just just math.

Basically, we approach teaching math the way people used to approach teaching language (full disclosure: I teach foreign language--I develop standardized language tests, which is where I use a lot of math): memorizing conjugations, etc., rather than focusing on tasks that one can complete using what you know already, but which will stretch you and make you develop new skills. Language teaching has realized that the way to keep people who may not be predisposed to language (another very difficult, largely-left-brain activity that I actually did like in school) interested is to keep the application of skills front and center at all times. Not everyone will be a great mathematician or become highly proficient in a foreign language, but many more people than do now could do very, very well if classes were more focused on application than "here are 100 problems; they're due tomorrow."
Ask HN: Sleeping/living in the office?
Say you're a starting a startup and want to keep your costs down, as well as well.. live in the office where you create software. Plus, it's a lot cheaper to rent a private office than to rent a studio.

So, what is the general view on such things in San Francisco? Is it strictly prohibited in many offices? What differs "living" from just accidentally falling asleep during an all-nighter?
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I wonder, but am too lazy to check, if this can be circumvented by changing kernel jiffy definition. K has to get the time from somewhere.
Garmin 256MB Secure Digital Card
Every Garmin 256MB Secure product is designed to meet the most demanding standard: customers' satisfaction. That's why Garmin equipment is manufactured to give you reliable service for years to come, with intuitive features you can grow into over time - all at a price you can afford.
In france there is quite a big difference, maybe hypocritical, between sects and religions. I don't think the distinction would hold against some serious examination, at least, it wouldn't keep all of it's meaning.

But to put it shortly any organisation that isn't one of the big historical churches, and has an heavy propaganda machinery around their religious beliefs and why they are good, is basically called a sect here.

Probably because france is living it's own cult of republic, wich is quite irrationnal in itself, but we have some endemic problem with religion and it's interleaving with power here. I think the situation is very very different in USA, and so there must be quite a "vocabulary gap" in our discussion.
I think saving right now is one of the smartest financial moves families can make. One reason being that if people have a stronger asset base then you not only have the ability to transfer value over periods of time, but you are in more sound financial condition when you buy a house. Think about the scale of the sub prime mortgage market, then think about how things would have turned out during the housing boom (2005, 2006, early 2007) if even 30% of those subprime borrowers had more savings to their names (the vast majority had none). While the financial crisis would have still occurred, maybe banks wouldn't have been hit as hard because a larger percentage of people saving could possibly translate into less people defaulting on their mortgages.

The second reason is the resulting taxpayer bailout of the financial institutions. The increase in taxes from all of these recent programs aimed at removing toxic assets from banks balance sheets, increasing liquidity in the credit markets, etc. haven't even hit taxpayers yet. Saving now enables people to react better financially when taxes rise later down the road. I don't think increased consumer spending (on credit) is as reliable a metric of the overall health of the economy as it was, because while the U.S. is a credit driven economy, using lots of credit and having any or little savings are one of those things that led us to where we are now.
But now you are putting your own ethics on the concept of manipulation

No kidding. That's the whole point of the parent post in the first place isn't it? He's asserting that manipulation, is self evidently wrong, that there is no justification to resort to manipulative tactics over argument through reason.

Here's a counter example for you: If we taught that murder is wrong, we'll never use it and we are less able to defend against it... etc. That's actually, exactly how most people are brought up and for good reason. We generally consider murder to be wrong.

Let me tell you something, the world seems to be raising more individuals comfortable with implementing these sort of manipulative tactics, "appealing to the audience" as it were. As far as I can tell, what this article promotes is a sure fire way to encourage your child to grow up into being a manipulating psychopath; nothing could be further from fostering talent for argument through reason.
If you didn't read the book(s) yet, they are highly recommended.
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Is Amazon Going to Open Source its Web Services and Cloud APIs?
As an additional point, these sorts of comments go to show how much "baggage" names carry, and just how hard it can be to find a good name for a company, product or service.

It has been suggested that the Vauxhall/GM "Nova" didn't sell well in Latin America because "Nova" can be interpreted as "won't/doesn't go" in Spanish, and when Rolls Royce brought out the "Silver Mist" to go with the "Silver Ghost" and other models, they didn't take into account that "Mist" in German means something entirely different (look it up).

Possibly it's somewhere between hard and impossible to find a name that nowhere has inappropriate connotations, but that shouldn't stop you from trying. Even so, someone will catch you by surprise.

When John H Conway found a new sporadic finite simple group he wanted to name it after himself, but wanted to get others to name it after him. He called it "Point Zero", reasoning that others would get tired of calling it "Point Zero" and simply refer to it as "Conway's Group".

Then someone called it "Dotto".
Imagine I'm in fifth grade and I hit open apple + control + reset. Instead of a blinking prompt, an editor opens where I see a bunch of curly braces and "Public static void main (String args[])"

Yeah, not as fun.
Is Google Afraid of Bing?
Critics Call Delaware a Tax Haven
I think it depends on the form of cheating. Cheating on anything you can do through learning - yeah, that's cheating yourself. But (in my high school at least) I've noticed that many homework assignments are pure busyword: there is no intellectual value to be gained through their completion, and all you are doing is wasting your time when in reality you could put it to a better use.

In those cases, I would not feel guilty in the least, and do not think I would be cheating myself either.
Ask HN: Which one is better for writing a SQL parser?
It seems that there are two choices: Lemon Parser Generator and YACC.

PostgreSQL uses YACC and SQLite uses Lemon.

My usages should be multi-thread, embedded parser for much simpler SQL syntax (a SQL subset).

Which one is better for this?
Why bother going to school? Because some of us are legally obliged to, and not doing so would be breaking the law.

It's dishonest, yes, but when you're in a situation where your two choices are spending time learning something on your own versus not copying a busywork homework assignment from a friend... the first stops seeming so unethical.
Text message just the ticket in airport security line
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Yes, why on earth is this a Facebook redirect?
Boy- I didn't understand a word you just said.
When you see a feature of our bodies that has obvious disadvantages, it will almost always have some redeeming advantage, obvious or not. And the bigger the disadvantage is, the bigger the advantage must be.

I know there are exceptions to this rule, like maybe the appendix or the little finger in our feet, but these are exceptions, not the rule.

So I have pointed out the disadvantage of having the testicles placed in an exposed part of the body; I ask, what is the advantage?
Lua and Python.

For real projects, Lua will expect you to know C, but in exchange, it avoids duplicating a bunch of functionality that you already have on hand. (Calling C from Lua is trivial.) The designers have done an excellent job of keeping the language simple and clean without detracting from its expressiveness. (Lua is to Scheme as Python is to Common Lisp.)

Python is bigger, and has more design quirks for backward compatibility, though Python 3 attempts to fix this. OTOH, it also has far more off-the-shelf libraries, and a significantly larger community.

(Forth is also fun. I'd be lying if I said I've ever done anything useful with it, but it really captures the wonder of being a kid and playing with Basic.)
Open Source Fanaticism = pure act of madness and sheer ignorance...
Amazing fact #1 - The author is a Microsoft employee!
For me and my company, my ability to finish things has had a lot more to do with me believing in the project.

In my limited experience, you don't invest your time or your money into a startup. You invest yourself. You sacrifice your health, your relationships, and your political capital to make it work. And you don't do that because you have to or you want to. You do that because you only have one goal, and that's getting your company off the ground.

There's nothing that I've ever invested myself in so fully as my company, aside perhaps from my marriage.
He is out of his minds, some of my comments, still in moderation queue -

Well I liked the suggestions for students in the end, the "some questions" part sucks big time... edit the post for typos and some questions over security are really hilarious, better think about this part "Security isn’t an issue unless you are deploying a server based OS!", and then do some research about DDoS, uncover some shit about msblaster, conficker etc... and then remember this for life - "security is an issue for every damn box out there"
Some people tend to raise such hot issues, people like me waste time reading their shit, and the ones who've commented above (include me) waste time writing replies, the author surely gets a nice entertainment and an engagement for _timepass_,
for someone with power to learn and ability to dynamically adjust to any of these *nix, windows, os x, bsd, solaris,
these matters are of no importance, for the purpose is in what you do and not in what you wear, what you look like, which language you speak, which OS you use...
A guy from Sri Lanka had similar troubles with open source - http://www.timeseye.net/2008/01/why-open-source-sucks.html
bet he didn't publish some comments I wrote..
some more discussions on a friend's blog -

http://zubin71.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/something-ive-never-...

and some more scribblings over such things

http://ideamonk.blogspot.com/2009/04/foss-spreading-its-wing...

so all the people who look for some masala and timepass, read each bit with wide eyes open and get your fingers busy for another 10 minutes expressing your views...

waste your time or move on you choose...

proprietary is nice eh??? how about paying some $300 to become a mac developer... this is how you know the lords of proprietary shit screw you sometimes... the least (best actually) open source does is that it gives you an option!
Take a look at famous "J prototype" source inspired by Arthur Whitney.

http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/Incunabulum

amuse yourself :)
Honestly I have no idea...
This article tells me two things: (1) static analysis is not complete, and (2) static analysis is not useless. (1) should be obvious, while (2) is implied but not stated. If you care about testing a lot, then it's perfectly reasonable to dispense with static analysis altogether and just write the tests.

This is where it goes into the commercial software bit: while that's a great regression test policy, I don't believe it's at all common. There are places where testing isn't really done. Probably most places. If you have no tests or bad tests, then static analysis is better than nothing.
It's the mark of a very bad writer, to take several sources of respectable ideas and use them to get to a conclusion worse than the original.

It would be like an engineer taking the finer points of concrete and steel and making something weaker than wood. I believe it takes talent to be that talentless.
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The trailer looks awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing the whole thing.
He might just be doing a very in depth study of breasts. You know, like every teenage boy dreamed would be the ideal job.
I think what's most terrifying is they raised roughly $100,000,000 USD in funding, from folks like Larry Ellison at that.

From the article:

Any interesting views from your office? "Well, the building opposite of us has two ladies of . . . 'professional status,' shall we say."

... at least we know where the money went.

Again from the article.

What was the most unusual bonus? "It's not one we can publish."

Suspicions confirmed perhaps?

Once again from the article

Little perks: "We operate outside the law. . . . We go out for curry dinners and booze and a lot of other things I can't mention

... that's the 3rd allusion to possibly having spent the money on hookers in the same article... or I'm just suspicious.

Perhaps Jason Calacanis can add that to his list of tips for startups - don't spend investment money on hookers :)
Shell script keeps me happy, you've not lived until you've used join(1) in production. http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/join

Assembler is good especially on something clean like a microcontroller. I like the AVR instruction set. http://www.maht0x0r.net/library/computing/avr/docs/8bit_avr_...

Hook up an AVR to a GSM module and a SIM and you've got you're own programmable cell phone, like this one http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...
I wonder what happened to my beenz. It was quite a crazy thing with people paying up to $1 to have you visit their website.
Well, among other things:

Sufficiently Lispy to not feel like a straightjacket; integrated documentation with worked examples for literally every language feature; vector/bitmap graphics, audio, as first-class data types; pattern rewrites as a superior form of macro system; higher-order programming of every kind (if you like Haskell, you can "write it" in Mathematica); the ability to execute individual lines of code and see immediate feedback; a parsing system which obsoletes regexps; syntax which never leads to tears (Perl, I'm looking at you); a library of curated data on almost every topic; seamless file and www i/o; debugging facilities unmatched by anything short of Symbolics Genera. I also ought to add that I have been programming in Mathematica full-time for almost half a year, and have never needed to use an external library of any kind.

This is only a small subset of the useful aspects. The biggest downside, however, is that Mathematica is proprietary and expensive. On top of that, it is also rather slow.

All of the features I've listed should be expected as basic and factory-standard on every computer. The fact that our expectations are as low as they are shows just how little actual progress has taken place in the industry at large in the past two decades.
LLVM for Beginners (Windows)
Just be warned that until you understand how OCaml "thinks", it'll seem like the language that whacks you on the wrist with a ruler whenever you try to do anything. Awesome language, kind of a quirky implementation though.

Of the books I've read, _The Little MLer_ conveys the mindset the best. (It's in the same style as _The Little Schemer_, but is about ML, type systems, and type inference in general.) For learning OCaml and its toolchain, the French OReilly book (free English translation: http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/) is a good text.
Looks more like Solaris (the new Soderbergh version) + Silent Running.
The Real Time Web is a Beautiful Distraction – Opposable Planets
is there anyone who does not favour personal and economic freedom in a democracy?
Wasn't sure if I was going to upvote because this doesn't really have anything to do with hacking, but the trailer looks so damn good I couldn't help it!
That does not seem to be a very complex pattern recognizer then. It does not recognize spiders, just small, fast movements. I seem to remember from school that it is quite easy to recognize such things with simple neural networks (even frog brains can do it).

I would think recognizing a breast would be more complex (since simply circles with dots in them are not as attractive, or are they?).
Or the way Google ranks things is not very suitable to that query (a ka there is no Hacker News/Digg/Reddit for science).

German Google actually finds a lot of links and the HN reference is further down.
This example highlights the difficulty of extrapolating from a single month or quarter of data

yet the comparison of the data that this article makes is that of this period with a historical period.

I think the author misses the context, the fact that we have been and perhaps still are in a recession. To compare the now with the booming years of say 2005 we all know that there has been a decrees.

Being in a recession, the comparison with say last year or last quarter makes total sense, not to be used as optimism but realistically to see the trend.

The FT says we have bottomed out, I only wonder if we have learned the lessons, or whether this cycle of boom and doom will continue as always.
Django is a type of jazz (just in case you didn't know) - of course it has SE traffic going way back.
The sad truth is that there are bugs in everything which aren't getting fixed. If a well-written patch were submitted, would it be ignored? Or are they just not placing priority on it themselves?

I can understand if somebody who wrote an incredibly useful system and released it into the public domain isn't always willing to take the time to fix bugs they consider minor, without being compensated to do so. (I'm glad he's sharing it, at all.) I don't think the issue is Ulrich Drepper-like behavior here.

About the inner joins - SQLite can be small because it doesn't have the tremendous amount of query optimization that e.g. Postgresql does. That's like complaining that a bicycle makes a lousy tow truck; significantly improving its query optimizer would require changing it into a completely different kind of tool, and a big part of its utility comes from being small enough for embedded use.
I believe it takes talent to be that talentless.

lmao, for whatever it's worth, the guy or gal has taken his/her time to go through the studies and present the information. To compare abstract thought with concrete objects is perhaps talentless :P
Just curious, what makes printed books (on demand) so cumbersome? Maybe a better solution could be created? In my mind I would have expected it to be very hassle free: upload PDF, set price, done. At least I see no reason why it couldn't be easy as that?
In American schools (even universities), the use of cheat sheets is often officially permitted.
There is a good reason why a GUID/UUID or the like should never be used as a database primary key when records are regularly added.

The short answer is that the records are usually stored in the primary key order (clustered index) and every new record being inserted at a random location in the middle of this order rather than just added at the end causes problems.

See
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/583001/improving-performa...

http://sqlskills.com/BLOGS/KIMBERLY/post/GUIDs-as-PRIMARY-KE...
Well (in a very rough sense) the Democrats campaign for personal freedoms and seek to control economic ones more (pro-choice yet more regulation). Likewise, the Republicans want economic freedoms and seek to control personal ones (low taxes, deregulation, yet ban abortion and gay marriage).

Obviously, any time you generalize a party into two vectors like this, it's not exact, and I'm sure there are numerous cases of policies from both parties that don't fit this nice little mold, but I think that is what the OP was trying to point out. The Economist's definition of 'liberal' does not mean 'democrat' as it does in most of America today. They espouse 'classical liberalism', which is more libertarian in nature, but not taken to the extreme. (They, for instance, support the idea of central banks and fiat money, and a carbon tax or cap and trade scheme.)

I'm not really old enough to remember, but my understanding is that the Republican party used to be more aligned to these views before they embraced the religious right to win elections.