skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've written a lot about this topic, but let's see if I can sum it up:

* Politics are way more important than most of what we talk about. So if we talk politics, we could easily fill the front page with it, and crowd out all the unimportant tech stuff. Who cares about Bootstrap when people are throwing bananas at a minister in the Italian government because she's black?

* People don't seem to get that you can compartmentalize: I care deeply about politics, but I also like having a high quality tech site that is about tech and startups. On these threads, people say that if I don't want politics on HN, I must not care about politics at all. Couldn't be farther from the truth. I also love to follow professional cycling, but I don't want politics on those sites either.

* Way more people care about politics than the stuff that makes HN HN. If we open the floodgates, it will attract lots of people who will dilute the site. As noted elsewhere, I think this is something of a feedback loop.

* I don't like the divisiveness of the subject. There are frequent posters here who have said they are Republicans, and given their statements on religion, maybe they're even in favor of $a_very_divisive_issue. I do not want to get into that discussion with them. It won't help anyone, will likely alienate people from the site, will probably lead to hurt feelings, and so on and so forth. I want to talk with these people about tech and startups. That's what we have in common.

* The quality of many of these discussions is not high, and for anyone who has been on this planet for a little while, little of it is a new or interesting contribution to the subjects under discussion. You can find the same topics discussed all over the internet, in every language.

* I think that the site has been "holed below the waterline" by the NSA stuff and the subsequent flood of articles, as well as the "outrage" articles about various grave injustices. Those tend to get a lot of upvotes and heated discussion too. I do not think that it will recover unless PG & Co start moderating it in a more heavy handed way.
Archive.org has an archive of old Byte magazines
There's one problem with your argument: patio11 doesn't actually do consulting anymore.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/07/17/kalzumeus-podcast-5-quit...
For example: the LISP edition
http://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1979-08
Yes, I was referring to HN discussions, not people in general. I wouldn't go up to random strangers on the street and ask them if they preferred php, python or ruby unless I wanted to perform some sort of sociological experiment :)
I didn't try building it from source, so I didn't know about any difficulties in doing so. I agree that that is a serious issue. In particular I wonder if patching Scintilla and Lua is really necessary...

About opening files and navigating buffers: I must have been a very naive Emacs user because I didn't really miss anything basic. I open files by typing the file name, with tab completion. I switch to buffers in two ways: if I have only 2 or 3 buffers, I advance between them; if I have more, I jump between them by typing portions of their their names. To navigate inside a buffer all I use are motions by character, word, line, paragraph, page; jumping to matching parenthesis, bracket or brace; incremental search; jumping to line numbers. All of this is present in Textadept, so I felt the basics were covered. (I am sure that more expert Emacs users will definitely find lots to miss in Textadept.)

Indenting of course is much more primitive in Textadept, that's definitely true. I'm used to indenting manually (well, not totally manually: having each newline start with the indentation of the previous one and then adding or removing indentation using tab and S-tab), from using other non-Emacs editors and esoteric languages for which no Emacs mode had been written at the time, so I didn't mind that much.

The first thing I really missed was eval-last-sexp, so I quickly wrote a basic substitute (since Lua doesn't have those easy to match parenthesis around everything, I evaluate either the selection or, if empty, the whole line; that works for me). I have the Lua code evaluated in an environment where the usual print function inserts text in the buffer instead of writing to stdout.
>What's the difference between "big corporations and private interests" on the one hand and "state" on the other? They seem in all cases to be organizations of human beings with the capacity to concentrate and assert power over other human beings.

The difference is in the use, origin and organization of such "capacity". Which makes all the difference in the world.

For one, state power comes from elections and laws passed by elected representatives of the majority. Corporate and private interest power on the other hand is arbitrary.

Second, the democratic state (however imperfect) was founded to serve the people. And in most cases it was founded BY the people, through bloody struggles against opressors (feudalism, colonial powers, the King, etc). Corporate and private interest power on the other hand is self serving.

To put it in another way, "private interests" amount to a dictatorial state (or, to be more presice, to a constellation of dictatorial regions of control). Something people fight to get rid of, and establish democratic states.

>The difference seems to be in the scale and scope of that concentration and assertion of power.

Private interests, if left unguarded, can drawf states in scale and scope (and have done so, in tons of historical examples, especially for less powerful countries. The term "Banana Republic" is an example of that).

So, nope, the difference is in the origin and check of that power, as well as the purpose of it.

>So, if you're inclined to minimize the capacity of any external institution to shape your life or to exploit you, which option is most optimal?

No question about it: stump private interests at every opportunity.
There is no entitlement to it, but we're not talking of a free market. Adobe has a legal privilege to punish retailers who may undercut them via "parallel import" and it's a crime to circumvent DRM. Without those legal privileges, a free market would work by bringing prices of like goods in line.
Actually, both:

Belgium
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-13/google-belgian-news...

France
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21302168
The recent pause in warming
writers get paid per word, still wondering why 80% of book has no substance?
It's terrible. Scrolling is super slow and jerky, and I'm afraid to zoom/resize to a comfortable reading view because of it.

I don't see why this is necessary for a "beautiful magazine feeling"? Couldn't they just used big pictures, a nice font and great layout, but in plain HTML+CSS it would give me the exact same experience, except of course 1000x better.

A while ago I came across a similar article (maybe it was Rollingstone as well) about Daft Punk's new album. I really wanted to read about Daft Punk so I suffered through that experience. The photos were very pretty but still I really wonder what sort of computer such pages are optimized for? My laptop is not super powerful but also just 1.5 years old. I used the latest Chrome on Win7, that should put me in their target audience for optimizing website experience right?

(of course that's assuming my experience is not the intended one and it's more pleasant for people on more powerful computers?)

But for this article, from the title I pretty much just wanted to know what's up with the ice in Greenland and what this means. So I didn't persevere and instead came looking to the comments here to see if the article is even any good.
Ask HN: AWS for my new Start-up? What about NSA?
Hi all! I'm in the process of setting up some servers for my brand new start-up, that I'll be letting you all know about in the next week.

Currently, I need a box to set-up our launch page, to get some wider feedback on what we're doing (in the Lean Startup style of working). Normally, I'd fire up a VPS and call it a day, but I want to be able to plan for the future.

Our stack is PHP5.4 with Postgres, with a nice Clojure service back-end (that will be split off into its own servers at some point in the future). What I also want to do is spin up a Gitlab server, and an Email/Owncloud/Etherpad/Jabber server for handling our internal documents, communication, etc.

In this case, I think AWS is the way to go: I get to keep all data in Australia (although, I'm worried about the possibility that because it's an American company and my government is too cosy with the USA's, my customers data is at risk. That said, everything will be encrypted as best as possible: HTTPS for everything, on-disk encryption for the drive, etc.)

The question is: Do I stick to the VPS, and sign up a couple of boxes for: 1) The Actual Server, 2) Gitlab and Internal, or do I spin up a couple of AWS instances?

Why, or why not the latter for what I'm doing?
There are no barriers to entry to take part in HN.
Let's just call it "Australian politics and White Culture" and call it a day. And I agree with you, fyi.
Surveillance, patents, DRM, and education have a direct impact on the technology industry. Getting these things wrong could destroy our industry. Health costs make it significantly more difficult to hire staff for new ventures.

If there was a problem with electric power in the US, we would be talking about that.
HTTP 2.0 Development Milestones
How Big Data Is Taking Teachers Out of the Lecturing Business
Not related, but keen on becoming a chapter. Not sure if there are official requirements or it is organic such as BarCamp. (Hoping and assuming it is the latter)
What are my options?
The answer is "Yes" to all of these, IMO
And when fuel prices spike up and there is no manufacturing knowledge at the institutional (I mean business here not education) level will Australians have to put up with importing all vehicles at extortionist prices? What will happen when the luxury car import duties apply to all vehicles? Think of the public investment as a hedge against the Australian dollar losing value (which it will do if China tanks) and/or a steep rise in the cost of fuel (i.e. it becomes very expensive to import vehicles manufactured elsewhere).
On the contrary, it's an easy argument by contradiction. If prices should be the same everywhere, then I should pay the same for rice as a rural villager in a developing nation.

But I don't, and I don't expect to, because I am relatively far more wealthy. Therefore differential price levels are acceptable in general: because otherwise our villager could not afford to eat.

And that is for an essential item. To hear fat, comfortable westerners complaining about the price of Photoshop is just revolting.
My long history of comments on the issue generally references my time at the old Japanese day job, where I was pressganged into dealing with our Indian subsidiary and asked to shepherd the five folks who came to work at our Nagoya location from it. This is what I was doing during three years of 100 hour weeks.

A more charitable read of my old comments would be "The project(s) were beset by communication issues, terribly managed by the Japanese company (which, in the fine tradition of Japanese companies, I'll take blame for since I was unable to resolve it despite trying), and additionally undermined by pervasive competence issues."

I'm not talking my book here. In the first place, I don't have a book, as I no longer consult. In the second case, Indian BPO firms are less competitive with me than Chinese take out restaurants: our target customers are different, our projects are different, our marketing methods are different, etc etc.
That's a rather long article for stating the obvious. It worries me a little that the author seems to have just found out about it though, and what's even weirder is the conclusion, which says that now he found out where the anger is from he can enjoy it while working on as usual.
I'm familiar with the transfer argument, but frankly find it a little alarming. Doctors are supposed to be very smart, but they're apparently unable to write down some sort of bullet point list or short paragraph about the state of a patient for the next person coming in? Good programmers document their code. The equivalent goes for doctors, too.

It doesn't seem like you care much about it ("scientific research"), but IMO it's much more likely to put programs in place to help doctors learn basic literacy/documentation skills than to subvert the basic biological truth that staying up for as long as most medical students/residents/etc are forced to do puts them in a state equivalent to drunk driving. (http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/09/20/sleep.deprivation/) I do NOT want someone crashing my health into a ditch because they were too tired to miss something important. Also if you don't have enough doctors? Maybe you should start training more of them, instead of artificially limiting supply. (Residency placement slots are a whole other issue, of course, but still not something that should stymie a first world country so.)

I've had way too much experience with rude, sleepy, and grumpy residents who bungled my medical care in the last two years of frequent ER and inpatient stays to have much trust in the profession as a whole. I mean, if you're going to charge me $50,000 for your crappy medical care, could you at least not snap at me? Or forget me in an observatory room for over 12 hours waiting for a scan? They "lost" me in the system somehow until a nurse wondered why I'd been sitting there so long, called radiology, and left the room to bitch them out about forgetting me. Since the doctors couldn't be bothered to tell me what they were checking for, I only found out 13 or so hours later that the scan was to rule out a carotid artery dissection. I was in extreme pain the whole time, which they did nothing to even try to alleviate. Incredible lack of empathy.

I'm glad to hear that your hospital has gone to at least trying to adhere to reasonable shift limits; it's a sign that at least some people in some hospital systems have decided that policies leading to killing or crippling patients is something that should be prevented, not encouraged. It's certainly not something I've seen in the major medical systems in my state. :(
Software-Defined Data Centers Could Change the IT Landscape
It's not free market at all - 'parallel imports' are not allowed. Price fixing is what is currently going on, and free-market competition is what the government wants.
Photoshop is neither a commodity nor an essential good; please explain why a free market needs to exist for it.
The title is obviously overreaching, but the content of the patent seems to be extremely broad, as well. I won't claim to have read more than the brief description, but it appears that this patents paid, user-specific formatting for any type of web content.
Car key immobiliser hack revelations blocked by UK court
I see rethinkdb as being focused more on the data model and language, and the cluster administration experience. The performance doesn't seem compelling yet, though they are admirably durable by default.

You're right, with a reliably performant engine you can get a lot more out of a single machine than a lot of people these days seem to think. That's part of our vision for TokuMX, to bring back a little bit of "scale up" potential to the NoSQL space.
When it comes to medical care, you have to be really careful about how you define "outcome" if you want to use that as an incentive. You can't just use patient recovery/survival, because then you'd have doctors avoiding patients that need their care the most. You'd also continue to get extraordinary measures taken to extend the life of patients that can't survive, even when letting them go is the more humane thing to do to ease their suffering.

I've thought about this a lot, and I don't think there is any objective way to provide outcome-based incentives. The best I could think of is peer-reviewed judgements of outcomes, but that could become pretty corrupt.
> Moreover it is, of course, also impossible to legislate against: the same laws would effectively peg the Australian dollar.

I don't get to say this often on HN: what utter rot.

When parallel importation of CDs and movies was abolished, the dollar didn't give a damn.

When region encoding was dropped on us via the AUSFTA Chapter 17, the dollar nary stirred.

The AUD is a small rowboat that navigates between the Scyalla of Chinese iron ore demand and the Charybdis of Ben Bernanke's public nut-scratching.
No explicit barriers yes, but many tend to participate more in discussions where they have an interest/opinion in the subject matter than ones there they do not. Even your previous comment about walking into a bar in Iowa reflects that as people that are generally familiar with whatever topic are more interested in discussing it than those that do not. Since nearly everyone, regardless of background has some opinion and knowledge of politics, the barrier for entry into those discussion is much lower and likelihood for such articles being upvoted.
See whats new in Android 4.3
Given this and your various other fallacious appeals to worse problems, I conclude you are beyond rational discussion. Suffice to say, you are the worst possible kind of hypocrite for arguing with us instead of being out there helping starving children.
The Disruption of Venture Capital
Another thing to analyze is what's called "diseconomies of scale" where costs and/or prices rise with scale. Also many countries subsidize the health sector.
What Young Mozart Teaches Us About the Secret of Cultivating Genius
Prepare your RSS feed for post formats
> You should read everything you read anywhere with skepticism.

Care to back that up with some data?
Why a competing site instead of a subreddit?
On the subject of RBS (not an organization that I have a very positive opinion of) - given that the corporation tax receipts from RBS in its boom years went to the UK government and it was the UK government that "regulated" the finance sector the most likely outcome would be that Scotland would take a pro rata portion of those liabilities.

That seems fair to me - especially as RBS has most of its UK operations in England, not in Scotland.

Trying to backdate things would rapidly get very silly indeed (e.g. Scotland asking for North Sea Oil tax revenue back?).
No, I'm suggesting that HN commenters here are likely far less competent to speculate about the cost structure of heart operations than believe themselves to be. In an analogous situation which they actually understand, the tenor of this comment thread would reverse in a hurry. (Which we could ascribe partly to self interest but in major degree to "Deliver X for the US market in America" and "Deliver X for the Indian market in India" being two very, very different propositions.)
You can use any remote with the AppleTV (it can be trained) and you can use your iOS devices entirely once you initially configure the wireless.
The all-electric BMW i3 Unveiling (Live)
The late 20th century was remarkably free of the kinds of conflicts between major powers that defined the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

There have been many wars all over the globe, including some in progress still involving the US, we've been on the edge of global nuclear war due to brinkmanship between the US and USSR, we've seen genocide in various African countries, Syria, Iran-Iraq, Iraq, Iraq II, civil war across the middle east. There is no Pax Americana.

That is not relative peace, that is a state of constant warfare, much like the rest of global history.
Not a huge leap. Studies suggest that US car dealers regularly practice price discrimination based on race.

[1]: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
Properly designed and written scalable software can last indefinitely with little or no modification, even through geometric changes.

Daniel Bricklin wrote an interesting article[1] related to long lasting software (PDF)

[1] http://changethis.com/manifesto/download/6.200YearSoftware
Nothing's wrong with it.

Just as there's nothing wrong with the various Parliaments in Australia legislating to modify consumer laws.

If that doesn't suit sellers, they may withdraw their products from sale.

(Given that the marginal gross on software is basically infinity ... they won't).
http://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/about_us has details on what to do if you want to be affiliated with them.
May depend upon what data you are storing - particularly customer data.

From the UK perspective I suspect that any data that might be deemed personal should not be stored on servers that are outside the UK. The fact that you know that foreign spies (NSA in the USA, in your instance) might well have direct access to the data only increases the imperative that one abides by local data protection laws and minimise the opportunities for 3rd parties to access the data.

It could be that a lot of "the cloud" is now completely broken for a very wide range of applications.
Hush - Chrome Extension for encrypted private bookmarking [works offline]
may you expand on your idea?
why'd they want to preserve such state?
I'm just trying to understand your intentions for having the data, but it sounds like you didn't have a set reason for collecting the data other than for the sake of recording it? Not that one has to have a reason, but just presumed you did. If so, then you're looking not only for tools to work with the data, but also a reason to use the data to begin with?
Show HN: Advanced Nmap options.
> It's Borges at his funniest

Exactly. My feeling in the first pages of Fictions was : is it some kind of joke ?

For those who read the House of Leaves, it's good to know that Danielewski took a lot of inspiration from Borges (among other things). If I recall correctly The Garden of Forking Paths is very similar in its purpose and construction.
http://www.steamprices.com/ is a good place to see what's what and find the most outrageous examples.

Anno2070 DLC has a 700% markup in Australia.
> Since nearly everyone, regardless of background has some opinion and knowledge of politics, the barrier for entry into those discussion is much lower and likelihood for such articles being upvoted.

And thus more people who are otherwise marginally interested in the site can participate!

This is a feedback loop.
You missed the point, the petition asks not to create a bill for a filter. However the current filter is being put in place without ANY law being enacted. The PM is threatening the ISP's into doing this.

This is not a democracy because I actually wrote to my MP about last year. He said he would vote against it. However there has been no vote in the commons.
What is the concept underlying image processing?
I use the ipython notebook sometimes, but I almost always use something similar. (In my case, I often use emacs org-mode files to make basic literate program-style documents.)

I keep these things in a dated "Notebook" file, like "Notebook/2013-07", just to hold all my one-offs.

Why do I keep them? Well, often it takes a while for me to set up the particular environment I need. If there's a problem with the calculation for X, I need to load the right data, set up the context for X, run through the individual bits until I see what the issue is.

I save the ipython notebook where I go through all that, and then if I need to go back to the calculation, for example to demonstrate to someone else my example that something has gone wrong, then I can just load up the notebook. If something is supposed to have been fixed, I can load up the notebook and repeat the calculation and see if it works now.

Unlike emacs org-mode, I can easily save the graphs as part of this. ("Look, if I plot the distribution, there's this big extra lump over there. Where's that coming from?")

If I go back to a file, it typically takes me a bit of thought to remember exactly what I was doing there. Once I figure it out again, I add sentence or two of markdown.

It's a useful thing to have around.
He doesn't mention that one specifically, more likely he is ashamed by questions on homosexuality etc.