skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fascinating story, as well as the wikipedia article about uncontacted peoples. I really appreciate the Indian government for the exclusion zone, as contact with the rest of the world will probably wipe them away.

From a anthropological standpoint, this is a nice paradox. I'm sure anthropologists would LOVE to study an uncontacted tribe. Particularly this tribe, as they appear to be of African descent yet are living in the middle of the Indian ocean. Unfortunately, there is no way of studying these people without, well, 'contaminating' them.
I'm not sure Jaron's ideas are coherent, but as usual, there's enough coherence here to provide some hefty food for thought. Some interesting ideas, which may or not be things Jaron is trying to say:

* Externalizing risk is a killer strategy for limited-liability corporations, since they can privatize their gains and socialize their bankruptcies, and really for whoever can get away with it; and many more people can get away with it with sufficient compute power. (He uses Maxwell's Demon and the Landau limit as a simile for this, but I'm not convinced that's productive either for producing new insights that are likely to be true or for helping people understand his point.)

* Contributions to social networks and commons-based peer production (Linux, Wikipedia, Facebook) are distributed in a sort of crudely Gaussian way, but value extraction from them is instead distributed in a fat-tailed winner-take-all distribution, which will destroy the middle class.

* We are moving our core engines of value production out of the economy. Jaron thinks this is bad, while I think it's way overdue.

* Jaron seems to be arguing that universal computers, which can trivially copy information and keep the fact that you have a copy of it secret from other people, are incompatible with any semblance of democracy. This is an interesting proposition, but it seems dubious to me.
I remember reading in Reader's Digest a couple decades ago about a gambler who had a photographic memory. He was very successful at this and smart enough to not be black listed by the casino. Unfortunately, one day, he was caught in a casino fire - several people perished, he barely survived. After that, he was unable to ever enter a casino again - because he would be flooded with exact images of the mayhem and carnage and death that he had seen that fateful day.

There is always a flip side to superpowers like photographic memory.
This one works for me.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vlc-for-ios/id650377962?mt=8
Iraq wasn't directly related to al-Qaeda, no. From a geopolitical standpoint, replacing one of the most hostile governments in the region with a more favorable one had some interesting long term potential. Eliminating the root causes of terrorism requires significant geopolitical and socioeconomic change in the Muslim world. Installing a new government right in the middle of the region could go a long way to helping with that over the next few decades.
IMO, you shouldn't automatically redirect mobile users to app stores. It prevents user from browsing your site. Instead detect the device type/ platform and show appropriate icon indicating you have a mobile app but let users browse your site.

I really find such behavior annoying. I refuse to download any app for sites that prevent me from browsing or annoying pop ups.

In this aspect I like Facebook as they show alert at the top of the page and once you dismiss, it doesn't annoy you again unlike LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Forums with Taptalk.
Institutions are beholden to political pressures. While idealistically their goal is to provide the most raw education, failure makes them look bad. They don't operate in a vacuum. Just like the rest of society, they are influenced by good people that want the most education for the most people and by complete shitbags that want to take the resources they consume. Institutions, unfortunately, have to provide education in a way that is defensible from criticism. The mere perception of failure is an avenue for attack even though everyone knows that most MOOC students will be casual and not fully committed.
The question asked if all X are Y. You want to assert that there are some X that are not Y. You can retain the original structure, and be correct according to the strict logic, by saying:

Not all X are Y.

or

Some X are not Y.

If someone came along with no knowledge of the field and read your statement: "all suspensions are not fluids." then it would be reasonable for them to deduce that for every suspension they looked at, it would not be a fluid. This is false.
A Public Policy Simulator: Think SimCity for Real Life | TED Talk
True, what many perceive as the C ABI is actually the OS ABI.

As most OSs tend to be written mostly in C, it is natural that C ABI == OS ABI.

In the few cases where the OS was written in other languages, like the mainframe systems, the early 80's OS done in Pascal dialects (Mac OS), Modula-2 (Lillith), Assembly (MS-DOS/CP-M) and many others to list here, there was no C ABI to speak of.
Emacs lisp doesn't guarantee TCO (and in practice does not perform it at all), and yet few people claim that it is not a dialect of lisp.
I just finished an online neuroanatomy class at SJSU this past week. This just goes to show how dumb the kids have become in California's school systems. I went back to school this past year to change careers into health care. I took a year of pre-reqs at a local community college, and then this class as a pre-req for my program.

It is shockingly absurd how easy and dumbed down they make classes in California's lower echelon schools. They basically hand you everything you need to know on every test on a silver platter: you don't need to read the book; they give you a study guide and EXPLICITLY tell you what will and will not be on the test; they sometimes will outright give you the exam questions, and students STILL screw that up. I took an abnormal psychology class where the instructor gave EVERYONE the exam questions, and students STILL did not show up for the exam or got questions wrong. I was like, HOW THE HELL IS THIS EVEN HAPPENING???!?!

I don't find this system of learning at fault. I find the students at fault. I think they should fail these kids as a costly lesson: study or lose out on $2000 bones. Bunch of nit wits.
Not only that, there are many more C and C++ compilers out there than just clang, gcc and msvc.
Not correct. Apple got a takedown request from a single (non-core) developer of VLC last time and had to comply due to the GPL.

The GPL itself is not a problem for them in general and they don't just go around removing apps that are licensed under it.
I learned Lisp after I learned Javascript, so I had the opposite experience of discovering that a bunch of Lisp-y things worked just as I expected them to.

I would never claim that Javascript is scheme (and it doesn’t sound like that’s what you’re claiming), but the things I love about Javscript are also things I love about scheme.

Is it the homoiconic-ness of the s-expressions you like?

Personally, I'd love to see continuations in Javascript, despite the potential for horrible abuse. Deeply nested callbacks are a pain in the ass. Of course, promises are a pretty decent solution.
You're being downvoted, but assuming you're talking about small non-weaponized drones, it's not necessarily a horrible idea. If you could do it without the people noticing, then you could learn a lot and not harm them. Of course, you'd heavily violate their privacy, but it's better than exposing them to diseases. I'd say I'm still against it, but given the kinds of viewpoints on privacy that are mainstream these days, it's at least worth contemplating...
I think he meant that the actual conversion to a paid customer. Of course you will get more sign ups (we saw the same at Usabilla), but that doesn't mean those additional sign ups will convert into a paid customer.

We have seen as well that there is less dedication from a customer when they sign up without a credit card. People sign up and forget about it, because it isn't paid anyway (even when you send them regular update emails). When requiring a cc for sign up the user is more motivated to actually trial the product and see if there is a fit.

It basically shifts the drop by sign ups from the actual users who want to use your product for a longer period.

Above is all from B2B experience. B2C can be totally different.
What is it that you don’t like about this. Is it that the var is hoisted?

http://www.adequatelygood.com/JavaScript-Scoping-and-Hoistin...

Hoisting generally seems ugly to me.

Edit: I think there is some confusion here about scoping. One axis is dynamic versus lexical scoping (are there other options?). Another axis is function, block, global, etc. scope. They seem orthogonal to me.
It is very very annoying.
I refuse to download an app by force.
For sure, there wont by many happy visitors
I actually agree that the "JavaScript is Scheme!" meme is over used today. My comment was more pointing out where I felt the meme's origins had come from. It really wasn't that long ago that mentioning dynamic programming languages would get scoffed at by "real" programmers. Today, with underscore.js being pretty standard, it's trite to say "Hey! JavaScript has lambdas, closures and first class functions!" But that was not always the case.
At the risk of feeding a troll, a bit of reading comprehension and critical thinking 101: regardless of whether or not you personally consider Clojure to be a Lisp, this is outside the discussion of the article. The home page for Clojure explicitly states "Clojure is a dialect of Lisp."

This is in contrast to JavaScript, whose creators never claimed it was Scheme or even a dialect, although the author of the article suggests it was influenced Scheme. In addition, he has perceived that lately, many people claim JavaScript is Scheme, and he rejects that claim.

Disputing the validity of Clojure as a Lisp is orthogonal to the subject of the article.
Javascript has C syntax but does not follow the C tradition of having one scope per block, instead having one scope per function. This is really unintuitive if you are used to how lexical scoping is done in other C-like languages and is the source of many common annoyances, like the closures-in-for-loops bug or needing to wrap your code in IIFEs[1] if you want to create a local scope or prevent variables from being global.

[1] - Immediately Invoked Function Expressions: (function(){ ... }())
Same here. Their page says:

>Support for network streams, including HLS, MMS or RTSP

Was hoping to see some simple dlna options. I'm streaming from Pogoplug not from iTunes or dropbox
In the education market, customers do not know what they are purchasing by definition. This is why there is so much crap in the industry -- companies have an incentive to spend money on marketing rather than content.

The latest round of MOOCs are not really monetizing educational content (which is and has been online elsewhere, often for free). They are packaging institutional prestige, the same dynamic Facebook used to drive student adoption. Khan Academy is the exception.
You can always fly drones around.
Edit: Non-Lethal, Non-Army drones. Just flying cameras to see what's happening there, or how they're living. Even better, really small cameras that look a bit like slow-moving birds.
I found this bit very interesting, and it seems insightful to me; if I'm mistaken, and this is utter horseshit for some reason, I'd love to hear why.

So what I’m proposing is that finance, and indeed consumer Internet companies and all kinds of other people using giant computers, are trying to become Maxwell’s demons in an information network. The easiest way to understand it is to think about an insurance company. So an American health insurance company, before big computing came along, would hire actuaries to set rates. But the idea of, on a person-by-person basis, attempting to decide who should be in the plan so that you could only insure the people who need it the least on an individual basis, that wasn’t really viable. But with big computing and the ability to compute huge correlations with big data, it becomes irresistible. And so what you do is you start to say, "I’m going to..." — you’re like Maxwell’s demon with the little door — "I’m going to let the people who are cheap to insure through the door, and the people who are expensive to insure have to go the other way until I’ve created this perfect system that’s statistically guaranteed to be highly profitable.”

And so what’s wrong with that is that you can’t ever really get ahead. What you’re really doing then is you’re radiating waste heat. I mean, for yourself you’ve created this perfect little business, but you’ve radiated all the risk, basically, to the society at large. And if the society was infinitely large and could absorb it, it would work. There’s nothing intrinsically faulty about your scheme except for the assumption that the society can absorb the risk. And so what we’ve seen with big computing in finance is a repeated occurrence of people using a big computer to radiate risk away from themselves until the society can’t absorb it. And then there’s some giant bailout and some huge breakage. And so it happened with Long-Term Capital [Management] in the ’90s. It happened with Enron, and we saw a repeat of it in the events leading to the Great Recession in the late aughts. And we’ll just see it happening again and again until it’s recognized that this pattern is just not sustainable.

Ignore all that stuff about "information" for a second, and focus on "outsourcing risk" -- I'm not saying that's a new thing to say, but how is it not true, and how is it not, uhh, vaguely important?
Try to think about it in the context of clicking on an ad for the product. Since the site is just a glorified app store page, I figure I am just reducing 1 click from the purchase flow.

Do I irritate enough people that they refuse to buy because they wanted to view the advertising site? This is a different scenario from a service which also provides a normal web service, but is trying to pawn off their mobile app.
Yeah, they are really not leaving me with any choice but to assume the worse possible circumstance...
My backup plan is the iOS Smart App Banner along with a custom Android solution that looks similar.

Good point about the potential double-prompt.
Never much love for Jaron on threads like this. Personally, I find his argument makes sense and he is consistent with himself - at least since he switched sides. Let me try to contextualise his main thesis. As technologists, we are Cultural Revolutionaries - elsewhere he decries digital Maoism. As such we tend to be blind to the effects of the technological changes we champion. We see the positive side, because for us, it is positive. Yet there is a negative aspect which is greater. This is insidious and universal. In much the same way as pollution which, given the pace of development, was barely even acknowledged as a problem until the 1960s. The damage is done not at point of dispersion, rather toxicity is increasing in the general environment. He says the nature of the toxicity this time is the erosion of a traditional economy in which most people used to come out ahead. The cause of this is the centralisation of economic power as a necessary consequence of current information architectures.
Next, he hypothesises a solution. He wants to make it market-based and since this is an information management problem, the hypothetical solution is architectural changes. He does not go into how this might work technically, but he provides a high level specification of sorts. If this were another thread on HN, some of us might begin to start filling in possible design solutions. Unfortunately, I don't see it happening here. Hope to be proven wrong though.
How to Optimize a Task
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_cookbook

No, it was a book, published in hard copy. And it's probably older than you are.

The best story I've read on the Internet about the Anarchist cookbook was a guy who claimed that he accidentally blew up his middle school with home made dynamite in Ireland, and only got away with it because the government blamed it on the IRA. (I can't seem to find it right now though.)

The fastest way to falsify that story is if the recipe for dynamite in the Anarchist cookbook is wrong. (Which it may very well be, as the book is full of wrong information IIRC.)
Streaming from Dropbox would be great. It seems your have to download a file before playing it back.
Even if the whole point of the click on the web page is to learn about the app?
Definitely one of the most interesting things I've read in months. Had me thinking of LOST at first heh heh.
Somehow I think drones wouldn't do well in the dense jungle.
> Scheme is even more Lisp than Lisp

That's not true. In fact, there are some prominent people in the Lisp community who do not think that Scheme is a Lisp.

See this thread from 2002 on comp.lang.lisp (especially Pitman and Naggum's comments) for more. If you are too young to have posted on C.L.L when Usenet was still popular, and want to see what a full fledged flame war looks like, look at the end of the thread.

Some people who posted there (including the OP) are on HN.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/Bj8Hx...
Never really understood the appeal of brew. I tried it several times, ended up wasting a lot of time looking for the recipes. I might be using it incorrectly.

I do enjoy using MacPorts because I can quickly search the packages from their website.
Maybe quadrotors, then.
Thanks! We've developed an analogous extension in Firefox, but it has been in the review queue at addons.mozilla.org for over a week now. If you'd like to try it out, you can download it at teameuler.com/hush.
Microsoft Writes Off $900 Million on Surface Tablets
It's not that auto industry collapsed, it's auto industry dumped these cities for poor performance.
What "billing incident"? Nice title, DUHHH.
How is it tragic?
I use iReader extension whenever the website's color scheme strain my eyes too much. It's essentially a clone of "Reader" functionality on safari.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk...
USSR Believed a Top Secret Room was at center of Pentagon - was a hot dog stand
I keep getting errors that say the theme can't be loaded.
My first reaction is someone finally decides to speak up aside all that marketing noise.
I think it would freak them out. A metal bird, making strange humming noise, hovering over their heads...

A couple of years ago I was driving on the I-95 from Las Vegas to Tonopah. Out of nowhere, a predator drone came up and flew next to our car for a good couple of hundred yards. A strange and somewhat frightening experience, even for someone who knows what drones are.

Besides, the thick jungle canopy wouldn't allow drones to get a good look anyway. We could launch crawling cameras, disguised as forest creatures, but the risk of getting exposed isn't worth the potential damage to the tribe, IMHO. I think the best thing to do is to just leave them alone.
> banned book weeks

The problem here is that it isn't 'banned' books, it's 'banned and challenged' books, which means 'any book anyone has complained about', which means Harry Potter qualifies.

You cannot tell me with a straight face that Harry Potter has been meaningfully banned in the Western world.

It's a pious lie which reduces an important topic to a laundry list of things the most extreme prigs got uptight over in the course of the past year or so. It trivializes the whole issue.
So what's wrong with the early generation iPhone since you think the dumb phone was still way cooler?
Why Tracking Time Matters
Please don't do that. Using iOS concepts on Android devices will alienate Android users.

Please, just stick your "available on Google Play" button above the fold.
Nice post. I was more interested in the fact that Discourse was being real-world tested/developed with three clients than this trite "rule of three" business though.
>Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the N.S.A. and the commander of the military’s Cyber Command

>Pentagon’s first units devoted to conducting cyberoffense and -defense operations

>The description of the Pentagon’s new cyberteams

>The administration recently conceded that it was developing cyberweapons.

>Future operations run by Cyber Command

>for now the cyberforce will be drawn from members of the armed services.

>The cyberforces are inexpensive

>other nations that are justifying the creation of their own cyberunits

>Iran has created its own cybercorps

/twitch

The amount of cyber in this article is TOO DAMN HIGH.
Show HN: Using http://gitignore.io [video]
Do you need to implement the common lisp standard to be "a lisp"? What is a lisp?
I couldn't agree more. When it comes to conspiracy theories, the logical thought process seems go missing.

I particularly like the one about how the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile.

Once again assuming this is true, any minimal amount of analysis raises a whole bunch of questions.

For example:

1) Flight 77 took off, so if it didn't hit the Pentagon where did it go? How did it just disappear?

2) The control tower voice and radar details match with the Flight 77 flight data recorder and they show the plane hitting the Pentagon.

Does that mean the control tower was in on the plot? Did the Pentagon also fudge the radar recordings?

3) Wouldn't the cruise missile also have shown up on the radar recording? Did the Pentagon remove it from the radar recordings?

4) Where was that missile launched from? Didn't anyone notice that launch? How did they keep the launch quite?

5) Wouldn’t someone, somewhere in the US Armed Forces be missing one cruise missile from their armaments inventory? Has no bean counter noticed that unaccounted missile?

And as always the conspiracy theorists answer to these types of question is the government did it but cover it up.
When is the last time any of those books were banned in the USA? (I chose a country where I know Mein Kampf is available to purchase and legal to possess.)
No, but so many top executives could have informed the public of ... even if that would, for all intents and purposes, be a resignation letter.
1/If you have 8 GiB of RAM, and you just surf, you don't care about the 64-bit overhead. Also 64-bit is more convenient as browser tend to flirt with the 2/3 GiB process limit.

2/If you have 64-bit machine, this problem is unlikely to exist on Windows.
At first I thought this might have been a repost of some refactoring advice I heard of long ago. A quick google finds a reference on wikipedia [0]. Essentially it goes like this:

The first time you implement something, just do it.

The second time you implement the same thing, copy it.

The third time, refactor.

The OP seems like an interesting variation on the same theme.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(computer_program...
Steam's Used Game Policy Criticised in EDRi Article
How long do you think it'll be until drone hunting is a widespread sport? Although, the only place with enough hunting rifles is the US, and it's probably not going to be popular there.
I remember that a Xorg development guideline explicitly required the same code to be used by at least two different subsystems (using hard coded if-based paths or copy/pasted) before it could be generalized into a parametric reusable function.
Less than three? Control-C, Control-V.

Three or more? Refactor!
Yes, exactly. Millions of tonnes of build, gravity and some weaken beams will do exactly that.

I'm glad you're starting to get a handle on this thing called Physics.
GPL is indeed viral, however it's viral under certain circumstances, not all. AGPL changes some of those circumstances.

I do not believe that _running_ your software on top of AGPL-licensed Juju makes one iota of difference.

The App Store is different: the restrictions the App store adds are at odds with GPL's defined freedoms. Not the same issue here.