skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those that faintly recognize the author's name... this piece was written by Jonah Lehrer, whose writings were later discredited for a combination of plagiarism, inaccuracy, and methodological weakness. Interestingly, in the ensuing reassessment of Lehrer's writings, this article has survived basically unscathed, but I think this discussion (including some statements from the interviewed scientists) is very useful:

http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2012/11/05/jonah-lehrer-nat...
The CIA explicitly has no law enforcement capability. Their killing therefore does not represent the enforcement of any law and as such does not require a trial. Their killing is therefore a military action.
Unknowable chance events and hidden variables (John Crabbe's experiments towards the end of the article).
Wouldn't it be great if educational institutions allowed "un-theses" to be accepted for degree requirements? That is, if you rigorously invalidated an existing theory. The university equivalent of the "Black Team".
Be aware that there is a backlog of "secret" patent applications in the US, where the patent application can be kept secret until such time as it is granted, at which point the easy invalidation described by Joel is not allowed.

For example the Twitter patent was granted, even though there is prior art (mine), and even though I submitted my prior art as soon as I found out about the patent. But I got a reply along the lines of "too late, the patent has been granted". It turned out that the application was kept secret until it was granted, thus guaranteeing protection from any prior art not already known to the patent office employee assigned to that patent.

The "new" US patent laws require an application to be made public after 18 months, but there could be thousands upon thousands of older patent applications benefiting from the secret option.
My favorite examples are from several years ago -- Charles Stross's Halting State and Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. The technology portrayed probably doesn't seem quite as amazing today in 2013, but I'm always reminded of how technology seems to be converging on those futures whenever I read over the latest APIs from the Khronos Group. More recently, Ramez Naam's _Nexus_ from earlier this year is pretty awesome, although a little more out there than the other two.
So compare it to the drug trade:

The ancillary crimes happen when the core product is criminalized; that is, you get drive-bys and chemical plant and pharmacy robberies when drug production is illegal such that the only way to compete in the drug world is to commit other crimes to defend your market and get raw materials.

When the product is legitimized, as happened with alcohol in the US in 1933, the criminal element moves out because it can't withstand the scrutiny a legitimate business is put under as a matter of course. Any legitimate brewing or distilling operation is being looked at from too many angles related to food regulations and taxes and OSHA and so on to be able to risk having undocumented workers make bathtub gin in a basement while killing off their competition.

From this, we can predict that outlawing porn, or making some kinds of porn illegal, will only serve to make the production of that porn a nastier, more illegal business which does more overall harm to society.

In short: Crime breeds crime.
Isn't this the same sort of thing that was discussed in the recent A/B testing articles? A test that demonstrates amazing results is going to be more visible than the ones that demonstrate weak results. It's kind of like how if you stop your A/B test when you see the strongest evidence, you're missing the point.
The original title on this was:

Spolsky, Patent Killer
How to setup your Mac for new hackers
New Zealand Government About To Legalize Spying On NZ Citizens
Are you referring to the need to use a timeout? http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2012/6/26/disconnects-are-good-for-y...
> because this purported big Android windfall still fails to appear on any Microsoft quarterly report

It shows up under the reporting of the Windows Phone Division:

“Windows Phone revenue, reflecting patent licensing revenue and sales of Windows Phone licenses, increased $222 million for the quarter,”

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/10/micros...

> Given the actual reality that these dollar amounts don't exist

The estimate is Microsoft gets about $8 for each Android device sold:

http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-most-profitable-mobile-opera...
Systemd provides a hook (ExecStartPre [1]) for running test commands before starting a service, e.g. checking nginx configuration before starting. However, I also prefer the flexibility of shell scripts over something like systemd's INI service definition format.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.serv...
Thanks! Great advice!
From your pricing page =>
https://search.nerdydata.com/pricing

25 cents a search seems a bit high for the most basic searches.

Realize this could be so that you don't have to sell ad-space and to make money right away (and fast).

Test query [ d3.behavior.zoom] results:

nerdydata => 11 code results

stack overflow => 126 results

github => 4,824 code results

bing => 283,000 results

google => 593,000 results

edit: I am really excited about this as finding websites with live code examples in JS would be extremely useful. Better to see live code than someone's (perhaps old?) blog post about how they did it.
And yet I still think the reason it happened was not because of gov't intricately and carefully orchestrating things with great forethought, it happened because media corporations went after easy profit and found out that pandering to the religious right was an easy and worthwhile thing to do to bring in the money.

Of course it isn't as if gov't isn't in on it, it is -- but not it ways that people think. They're doing it more subtly:

"The major exception here is the Department of Defense, which has an ‘open’ but barely publicized relationship with Tinsel Town, whereby, in exchange for advice, men and invaluable equipment, such as aircraft carriers and helicopters, the Pentagon routinely demands flattering script alterations."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/lights-camera-covert-action-the...

http://original.antiwar.com/sean-a-mcelwee/2013/04/28/propag...
That (iii) including "industrial" or "commercial" equipment could be interpreted very broadly. In other words, sorry, can't use a Leap to control the lights in a conference room, upscale club, or retail store without special permission from Leap.

I'll pass.
this looks amazing, if only it would support gmail and yahoo as those are the two big use cases for me :) Couldn't find the "provider wishlist page" that you mention on the FAQ page. Overall, great job making this dead simple. Will definitely be using it in side projects!
Rock your Mac in 2013 - Part 1
The author might be underestimating the NSA's technical ability. The logic here is that each person has ~300 friends, and three hops is 300 x 300 x 300 = 27 million. This is a big number, but the NSA doesn't have to give the same scrutiny and technical resource to each person. It's well known that most of the connections won't be interesting and there are methods to reduce the size of the list.

Which brings us to the author's dismissal of pattern recognition. Statements like "A pattern recognition algorithm would come up with “young Saudi men” as the closest heuristic for the 9/11 bombers" are equivalent to "I've designed a bad classifier in my head and I'm telling you how wrong it would be". The NSA has more than a few smart people on this and they are probably working all the harder due to so much public attention. Algorithms can get very sophisticated with a sufficient amount of data and processing cores.

The reality is that the NSA doesn't have the technical capability to find meaning in billions of communications. But they aren't stupid either. The scale of their data isn't going to hide us. Whether or not they'll use the data responsibly is another question.
Plexer.js – Bootstrapping Web Workers for the Real World
Scour code that you find interesting and write a piece of software.

The best advice I was ever given was to think small and in terms of "pieces" or "parts" of a program as a whole. Write something that doesn't do anything, well...for lack of a better term..."useful".

Don't think too grand when you're just getting started, though. That's not to say don't dive right in, but take it simply at first. A few lines at a time.
Awhile ago Bret Victor tweeted:

"Human race shoots self in foot, builds prosthetic replacement, completes 100-meter dash. Introducing iWork For iCloud."

Can anyone explain what he meant?
>Show me a war in which no civilians died.

Show me a war in which these civilians died. As far as i remember there no war has been declared between USA and Pakistan. So these civilians were killed outside of war zone.
Plus if you have a million researches in your area of research a 1 per million chance your results are wrong is still no assurance. Should statistically happen to one of the researchers in your area.

Very good article by Warren Buffet that touches on the same issue: http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.html
Then so too are gang shootings, domestic murder, and terrorism itself?
Not unless the Second Amendment Lobby has tactical nukes, which it doesn't, because nothing else scares the US Army at this point.
Gitlab 5.4 released
ZeroMQ is an impressive project and I like reading Martin's (passionate!) blog posts. Haven't really needed it though. I hope I'll get a chance to use it to build a distributed high-performance system one day.
I wonder if your monitor's backlight puts out an inordinate amount of infrared light. I've noticed interference with IR remote control reception when one of my LCD monitor's backlights is turned down close to minimum brightness; I'm assuming that the PWM dimmer frequency (or one of its harmonics) is making it through the filter used by the IR receiver.
Through which category did you get your PR?
iCloud.com sucks. They're trying to replicate iOS UI and functionality in the browser and it's an abysmal failure. Steve Jobs always liked to tout Apple and their employees as artists. Well artists have to know their medium and that's something Apple really needs to work on.

Edit: What's with all the down votes? This is valid criticism.
God is perfectly just. Yer fucked.

God says...
partake incorruptible sanctified endued strives entrance
weighing demonstrate
Nope. See this Programmers salary report :

http://www.programmer.com.cn/14918/

CNY 3k - 5k , that means USD 400 - 800.

Nearly 1/5 programmers in China live in this salary.

What USD 500 can buy in America?
The position is generally given to a veteran journalist...Sullivan was formerly the editor of the Buffalo News. So to answer your question, she, and others before her, aren't likely to launch bombs at the NYT because like most members of a group, you have enough experience to know that controversies are more complicated underneath the surface.

So no, they're not going to hire someone who is either actively bent on discrediting the newspaper...because that would imply the newspaper execs believe that the newspaper is something to be destroyed. The position is meant to be one that improves the newspaper and its accountability to the readers. Many of her columns raise questions and doubts about Times' coverage, but the expectation is that this makes the newsroom a better place...similar to how transparency in government ostensibly makes it better in the long run.

But, on the other hand, if Sullivan became the David Souter of the Times...she would be for all intents and purposes, difficult to fire without creating a shitstorm. I'm not sure what's in the NYT's actual 4-year-contract with her, but barring her committing some journalistic crime (like plagiarism), it's not likely she can be removed for the content of her criticism.
Can you see, I was waving...
What is complex about Scala's pattern matching? x matches the value x, x:A matches instances of A, A(x) matches if A.unapply(x) evaluates to a Some, and _ matches anything. Erasure throws a wrench into it, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward.
pick your projects smarter. Most people doing 80 hour weeks are not doing projects that are turning up publishable results. I was there.
He only nods his head repeatedly in its general direction.
I think you're misunderstanding this community as a whole. Hacker News is a community created around Y-Combinator, a startup incubator. The essay I linked to was written by Paul Graham, co-founder of Y-Combinator. Hacker News is his brainchild. I recommend you give the Wikipedia page on Hacker News a read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News) to learn a bit more about the community.

In other words, this is not the community you are looking for.
"The company relocated to East Texas...."

This, I gather, was a mistake.

While the East Texas "Rocket Docket" gained notoriety early on (and probably for some time), I've read recently that due to all the patent lawsuits they've been handling they've learned what it's all about and are no longer so plaintiff friendly. I suppose the bad press had an effect as well.
That's not just a streetcar, that's the "red rocket!" ;-)
It's not exactly serverless. You're just using their server instead of your own. To make this work you have to give oauth.io your private keys. That said, I love the simplicity of this implementation. OAuth is still way too hard to implement by hand.
Maybe you will be able to dual-boot with Firefox mobile OS as well.
The RPi has a terrible USB system. Hopefully its successor fixes this problem. In the mean time, there are lots of other ARM boards available.
What problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.
On the contrary, if I see someone writing in Clojure or Scala it is a good indicator that they can be taken seriously.
I've been using supervisord for most everything (doesn't hurt that I'm primarily a python guy), but I'm slowly testing out Mozilla's circus (https://github.com/mozilla-services/circus) and it's been going great so far.
The CDC already refuses to recognize male rape victims because it defines rape as penetration: http://www.genderratic.com/p/836/manufacturing-female-victim...

So take statistics like that with a huge grain of salt.
You're right, with one clarification: Miss. isn't an abbreviation, it's the full word. Ms. is short for Miss but is used for professional communication nonetheless. [Source: I transcribed documents intended for lawyers]
Semiaccurate is living up to its name.

Yeah, Microsoft has lost its way. It has some amazing strengths and a lot of smart people. It can turn itself around. But the parallels to IBM are astounding. Their internal politics and HR policies are insane. They have meetings upon meetings. Etc.

But they know they are losing and, unlike the IE/Netscape battle, they can't win on price and bundling. This level of awareness gives them a chance.

If the re-org works, it will break the power of the intrenched divisions and they can stop being their own worst enemy. Or maybe it will just get Balmer fired. (I vote Scott Gu for CEO :)
I've played with the beta, and it's pretty neat being able to have what almost feels like a desktop quality experience in a browser. It does have a bit of an iOS 6 feel to it with gradients and drop shadows, which is surprising.
I agree with almost everything you are saying but would like to point out that in my observation on HN some community members (by your definition of "community") are more equal than others. And what they say, think and perhaps up vote or flag means quite a bit.

Noting last paragraph of this top 10 profile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm
Thrift has been my backend RPC tool of choice both at work and on personal projects. It's been terrific for building composable backend services with tightly integrated language support.

Pros:
- Explicit contracts through the IDL. I despise implicit contracts in service oriented code.
- Code generation for many languages.
- Server and client interfaces that don't require as much ceremony as HTTP.
- Fast binary protocol

Cons:
- Sometimes the generated code isn't exactly what you want (can feel a bit Java centric)
- Binary protocol isn't human readable, can be harder to debug.
- Stream oriented calls aren't very feasible without some sort of home-grown chunking solution. This is why tools like Cassandra tell you that the whole request must be able to be held in memory.

Thrift is definitely worth a look if you're shopping for an RPC tool: http://diwakergupta.github.io/thrift-missing-guide/
I liked Start Small Stay Small, but haven't tried the academy. I just try things in my own business, school of hard knocks as it were. How much is the academy?
>>For example, it requires matter with properties that have never been observed in the universe (namely, violations of the positive energy condition).

At first I thought about this, but then its for us to really ponder on a simple fact. You can achieve a X goal by doing Y, but to say you can achieve only by doing Y is wrong.

Scientific history is standing testimony to that. People have expressed skepticism about anything and everything, stuff like airplanes, nuclear energy, mobile phones, internet anything you name it. 50 years before they were all invented and put to use, they would have all seemed pointless directions of pursuit- yet all of it makes perfect sense today.

Yet some tangential line of thinking causes a major technology break through every now and then we are left wondering what we where thinking all along.
This title could attract more traffic. Programmer is a good topic, and double salary as well.

Your point is correct. But people will ignore the key.
That's really interesting to hear the "other side" as it were. I think the US mentality is to simply not tell you anything about the other county so that you don't develop any sort of personal feelings.

I was a child during the cold war, but I actually could not tell you one thing about any Russian person that I was told during that time, aside from the "evil" leaders hated our way of life and how they desperately wanted to destroy us.

Unfortunately I think that still works - it's still not that unusual to hear about how terrorist hate our freedom, want to take away our freedom, etc. If you have any interesting in understanding why such thing may be true - you have to go out of your way to find news about it.
What is everyone talking about? The Chrome logo is there and so is this:

"iWork for iCloud works with Safari 6.0.3 or later, Chrome 27.0.1 or later, and Internet Explorer 9.0.8 or later. "
The internet killed fact-checkers. In order to beat the 24-hour news cycle, reports have to be done asap, and fact-checking just gets in the way. Removing fact-checking is just a risk management strategy, methinks, as sure you'll lose out from time to time, but overall you'll be so much faster!.

I lament the loss of fact-checking, and it pains me to see errors in professional services that should be picked up be even first-year tertiary students.
Can I use this to fix my python-gist script which needs a GitHub OAuth token but is not really supported because it's a console app?

https://github.com/voltagex/python-gist

Edit: Yes, I can. Until I get 100 users of the script, then I'd have to shut it down.
Canonical seeks $32M to make Ubuntu Edge smartphone
Sorry for the botched formatting (HN is for some reason not showing me a edit link :/ )

A quite interesting paper on the topic is McMonigal & al. [1], it is a bit technical but they discuss the Alcubierre warp drive quite nicely.

To elaborate on the second paragraph about special relativity, one way to define Lorentz transformations is, that they are the transformations which preserve the causal structure of Minkowsky space. On the other hand, the speed limit is a direct consequence of the Lorentz transformations. So the causal structure and the speed limit are directly related. To look again at the argument that a velocity larger than the speed of light implies causality violation: The moment you argue that a speed faster than the speed of light is possible, you implicitly change the meaning of causality. Then you use the Lorentz transformations to conclude that in on frame of reference event A precedes B and that event B precedes A in another. So you first deny the special status of the Lorentz transformation, just to go on and use Lorentz transformations. And my take on this is a strong maybe, the moment you start talking about local Lorentz invariance violation, anything goes. Perhaps there is causality violation, perhaps not, but this depends on your specific meaning of 'causality' and 'faster than light' and not very much on special relativity.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5708
MaskMe - hide email, phone and credit card info online
Ask HN: Any spy app for iPhone?
Can my apple iPhone camera shoot me without my permission? Is there any app which can work hiddenly and make my phone a hidden webcam?
By going broke.
Just one. Financial incentive to obtain positive results. Especially in the drug market.
I think you have misunderstood what what I was trying to say. I was explaining why posts like this with seemingly little information density, redundant "congratulations" comments and low relevance to probably majority of HN users pops up at top. Yes, I've found raganwald's articles and comments insightful more than one occasions. However I've little interest in what color of pajama he wears in night or what flavor of ice-cream he likes. That's what Facebook is for. And there is a reason I haven't checked my Facebook "frontpage" in month. I think of HN as community of like-minded people who likes to share relevant insightful information. I do not have any judgement on what this "like-minded" means or what "relevant insightful information" should include. If some community member in leaderboard started having secret extra marital affair, should it be on frontpage of HN? I think it should be left to community to decide. What I was trying to say is that lack of downvote button disables community to make this decision. When you have only upvote button, a small group of people can collude (knowingly or unknowingly) to push anything at the top very easily whether it reflects the general sentiment in community or not. I'm still not proposing HN should starting having downvote button. As a machine learning guy, I'm endlessly fascinated with collaborative filtering and this is interesting case for me how lack of downvote/dislike/negative ratings impacts relevance.
Gangs, civilians, and terrorists are not governmental entities and therefore not military. A state-sanctioned terrorist attack would likely be considered a military action by that state. Organized violence against a foreign country by citizens of another is also referred to as military (e.g. [1])

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_%28military%29
Krugman has said himself that having a regular column in the most widely-read newspaper in the US is a huge source of influence.
I'd add bad math. Fisher significance testing is on shaky grounds[0] both theoretically (significance testing violates the likelihood principle) and practically (just by nature of having a small sample size, a lot of null hypotheses can be rejected, while with a larger sample size hardly none are rejected). Hypothesis testing is little better. The "Bayesian revolution" has barely begun and has yet to influence a majority of researchers.

[0] http://uncertainty.stat.cmu.edu/ Chapter 12.
cwings? cwings.org from 2007?
Hope to see you climbing (in Dogpatch?)
Exactly, also the more well known attack in Yemen. Also not a war zone.

Firing missiles on civilians, or "combatants" that aren't engaged in any conflict with you is a war crime.

Would you accept this, if the US fired a missile into a Canadian cafe because they thought a terrorist was in there and everyone around him must ALSO be a terrorist (and thus an enemy combatant)?