skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with that first paragraph. My main disagreement is about your use of 'No'. I don't see how what you say contradicts what I said. Care to explain?

I won't comment on paragraphs 2 and 3, because they, to me, look more like opinions than factual discussion.

The last paragraph, similarly, IMO is not built on facts. "The corporate world uses the GPL" certainly isn't uniformly true. To mention one example: from what I can see, a C compiler is part of the "really important stuff" and clang is more popular than gcc for new developments.
Says the Ayn Rand disciple. Anti-government is great, unless it's anti-American government, then it's treason.
Exactly, you got it. is_a? and respond_to? are code smells.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/27/books/l-chomsky-and-the-kh...

His further assertion that Noam Chomsky attributed the deaths of the Pol Pot era to ''nothing but'' a war-induced famine is an outright lie. Mr. Chomsky (and the present writer, who was co-author with Mr. Chomsky of his published works on Cambodia) went to great pains to stress that there was no doubt that the Khmer Rouge was committing serious crimes, although we took no position on their scale (which was very uncertain at the time).

Also http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2779086.html

This looks interesting, but I've no clue as to the reputation or connections of the source: http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm
Every response from the NSA and people speaking on their behalf, both before and after the Snowden leaks, has basically been

1. A denial that they have the "capability" to do [insert method of mass surveilance], leaving open the possibility that "capability" means legal authorization;

2. A quasi admission that maybe the surveillance happens (Clapper: "not wittingly").

In other words, "we're collecting everything, but we'll only inspect your data if you're not American, or have a relationship of any kind with someone who has ever contacted a terrorist suspect."
I can't speak for everyone, but that's certainly the main reason why I'm not on Quora. Even before the whole "login to read" thing, I sometimes went there, skimmed through the topics and profiles of people and my impression was "So, it's a social network for Silicon Valley people. Why should I care ?"
Maybe it's simpler than all this. Maybe it's just a front for organized crime. The front of a mob operation won't seem to make much financial sense if looked at too closely, because what's really going on isn't in the reports, and what's in the reports is just for show.
Tell HN: I would pay for that..
Have you ever said "I would pay for that" ?
If so share it here. You never know in 2-4 months a startup can do that and you can pay for it at last :)
Attack on American citizens is a way more powerful message than attack on German or some other "second class" citizenry :)

But also, it is American elected officials who deployed the program on American taxpayers money. Therefore, American citizens, unknowing to themselves, have become a major investor into the greatest surveillance network in history, which spies back on them and the rest of the world.

So Chomsky's quote hit it right home.
Or:

1. Use Bootstrap

2. Customize it

Has worked for me on https://kippt.com & https://sendtoinc.com without dragging down the design
Redefining while loops in the worst possible way
It seemed so promising initially, but has really gone down the drain.
I'm no Linux security expert, so any advice on that front is hugely appreciated.

whack-run is supposed to drop any privileges it holds when it runs "setgid(getgid())" and "setuid(getuid())", and it exits early if either of those calls fail. Is there any reason why that wouldn't work?
The Secret FISA Court Must Go
Facebook, of course, solves this problem by simply being what it is - a social network. The whole point of Facebook is that you get to follow those people who are already in your social circle, and the content they produce is presumably somehow relevant to you. If Facebook suddenly started to force random Spanish (or English, for that matter) content into my feed, damn right I'd be angry and demand change. (By the way, I'm rather sure that most of the content in Facebook is not in English these days.)

The problem is that Quora is based on an entirely different premise and wouldn't really work too well based on existing social circles. What it does need is circles based on topics and areas of interest - of course it is a real problem if you cannot easily filter the content for topics that actually interest you. Geographical distance is one dimension in the complex function that measures how interesting a certain topic is to you.
> I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close.

Why not?

Here's a pretty standard progression:

1. there used to be a bakery a few blocks away--medium-scale, medium-convenience. Six or seven of them in your district.

2. Then a supermarket came. It was just a bit further away than the nearest bakery, but it included a bakery and a bunch of other things. The bakeries went out of business. One supermarket per district was all you needed.

3. But supermarkets aren't something you pop into for an "experience"--you don't visit one on a date. So, someone trimmed down the bakery idea to the most consumer-focused essentials, giving people only what they wanted and none of what they needed (the supermarket covers what they need, after all), and launched... a cupcake shop. Maybe just one to start. But then, suddenly, they're on every street corner.

I could see the "cupcake shop" equivalent to a bookstore: not a big pile of unsorted old tomes, but rather an exquisite presentation for a small, heavily-curated collection of books. A showroom for books, if you will. The clerk would have read everything on sale, and be able to talk at length about all of them. You'd be matched to a book in the same way an Apple Store employee guides you to a piece of consumer electronics. Etc.
How We Increased Our Conversion Rate By 311%
The reasons GTV was such a "messed up platform" are entirely mundane (IMHO).

What were those reasons?
I refer you to Charles Alexander's idea, which goes through a bit of the math for why traveling with the peak of an intense, low-frequency sound wave would give freakishly low drag.

http://charlesalexander2013.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/hyperlo...
We have a number of clients using cheap/privacy vpns as their mobile ISPs fuck with the traffic going through plain IP connections.
It's not like there aren't people competing in this space either (like StackExchange). I would love to understand why people use Quora and how they got to the level of popularity that they seem to enjoy.
I don't think you can really -write- an apology. It's the human emotion that's at the heart of a real, genuine apology.

Anyone can say "sorry", when it's in an email, and the author could really be cut-up about it. It's far too easy to pay lip service by using a prepared note following the 5 steps (especially an email apology about having an intrusion in your databases) but it's harder to look people in the eyes and keep up the act.
Prism: Create and explore personalized infographics of your SMS history
Dude I know Bill and Ted told me it was..DUH!
Indians are what, half of the English speakers in the world? Any en-language site with a global audience is going to have more Indians in it than most US-ians are used to.
aren't you simply wasting a tone of precious time checking the details? Can't you find out the cause, send the folks the help, and only later gather all the details and pass them on to the crew on the way?
That just seems like a limitation of your mapping layer. I don’t know ActiveRecord, but in SQLAlchemy you can map, say a 2DPoint (virtual) column named ‘position,’ to either native PostgreSQL Point type, 2‐element array, or for databases that support neither to two entirely separate columns quite seamlessly.

You can then use table.position as you normally would (table.position == [2,5]) and it will get mapped to the desired operation (e.g. table._x = 2 AND table._y = 5).

Though don’t use arrays for tags, see my other post.
> permitting special interests, cronyism, and incompetence to flourish. We in the marketplace (minus Industrial Military Complex) have no such protections, and actually have to produce value to make a living in a fair exchange of goods and services.

Cronyism and incompetence may or may not be inversely correlated with success, but the market does not select against those traits, specifically.

To abuse a metaphor: as a business, you don't have to outrun the bear. You don't even have to outrun the other guys. And businesses are, in the end, run by collections of irrational-in-aggregate human beings.
You don't even need a magnet. I made an electric motor as a kid out of nails, wire and a battery. It worked pretty good.

But, being a boy, I wanted it to work better. So I replaced the battery with a lamp cord and plugged it in. It promptly burst into flames. Awesome!
It's not meaningless, though. I would say that the reason is not that it betrays what they really think, but that older people learn not to say it out loud. In this sense you would essentially be saying, "don't judge him until he learns to hide his true thoughts."

I'm not saying this is what you truly feel, but you relate a cultural convention that perpetuates a stereotype that young people are stupid.
I deleted the comment shortly seemingly before you replied, because I saw the setuid syscall. So I may have been overly paranoid.
By "torspace" I meant websites running as Tor hidden services.

Anything flies on there.
Sure, we say and do dumb things when we're young. But that was not my point. I don't hold him accountable for that per se.

What I was saying is: I doubt that, at the time Zuckerberg launched FB, he was thinking "privacy is already dead, so let's see how we can make things better again for everybody" when at that same time he, being 20, said those stupid things.
"Most government employees are unemployable in the marketplace"

This statement is so blatantly false that I have a hard time believing that you are engaged in honest discussion when you state it.
all you have to read is:

"Like Facebook does..." oh man wowsers
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6115088 (331 points, 84 comments)
This is how that "standard progression" actually happened in my town:

1. There was no bakery a few blocks away. Maybe there was in 1850, but not in my lifetime.

2. There were two grocery stores, both of which sucked. one sucked way worse than the other, though.

3. The crap grocery store went out of business.

4. Walmart opened up.

5. A coffee shop, bakery, fro-yo place, hockey arena, sports bar, hair salon, tire store, Dollar Tree, AT&T store, and J.P. Edwards mortgage lending place opened up in a cluster around the new Walmart.

You won't ever see the small bookshop version of this story because for the most part, nobody reads books.

The one thing you might see more of is Bookman's style used book shops next to the Walmart. In low reading zones they will sell other used stuff.
Disagreement is not evidence of treason or conspiracy. Chomsky can be both smart and wrong.
>...and if I were a producer that discovered how to make a resistant orange by genetic engineering, I'd just do my best to spread the damn disease and wipe out natural oranges together with the competition, making more money to finance more genetic engineering research...

No, you'd be thrown in jail for bioterrorism. What you propose is seriously unethical, even if it weren't criminal. Furthermore, your attitude would convince much of the populace that people who promote GMO food are completely insane and unethical.
And yet, PostgreSQL ships with two index solutions (the ones mentioned in this article) that allows you to index them as if they were sets, supporting highly efficient queries of the form "give me all entries that have the four tags on them". This really depends on your data model and what kinds of queries you want to perform. Even that tip talks about large numbers of elements: you don't usually have large numbers of tags.
Pretty much my view on the subject.

One thing I'd really like to see for go is a UI toolkit which is native to it. Not Qt, Gtk, Wx ports, but a proper high level UI framework like WPF (but not!). I reckon that would take it into the financial and business sectors in no time at all.

That and dynamic loading at runtime.
The correct answer to that argument is "yes, it would be better to be able to filter out Silicon Valley stuff, too (but this is why there wasn't as much pressure then)." Whenever people are accused of having a double standard this, I don't know why they don't just say, "Yes, you're right too. Let's be on the same team." It seems obvious to me.
Did you just compare Elon Musk to Jesus?
Go is an interesting and promising language and I look at it as the spiritual successor of the C programming language. That said, I don't find it all that easy to pick up. At all. Despite having some experience writing in ANSI C (C89) I find getting started with Go pretty painful, not for the syntax (it's simpler and more readable/declarative) but for everything else, starting from the library. It's not straightforward or intuitive how to perform even the basic tasks (as basic as reading/writing from files/sockets) and even the online documentation isn't that good: it's just a bunch of prototypes. There are many new concepts/constructs that you may first think as a useful addition but that are actually a pretty fundamental part of the language (e.g. slices).

I'm sure that with time and the right mindset one could actually enjoy writing software in Go.
Any time you start a sentence with "I'm sorry but", generally (a) you aren't sorry (b) the following statement is going to be wrong.

He doesn't want to see lots of Indian local politics/culture topics, because they don't interest him. This implies no dislike of or prejudice against India, merely disinterest.

He doesn't in any way shape or form say that the people posting about such topics shouldn't be on the site, and his proposed rememedy - being able to block such topics, is clearly intended to allow him to co-exist on a site containing many such people and to still interact with those people about topics that do interest him.

Not all discrimination is born of prejudice.
Charge monthly. That's better for a hosted service anyway, as it matches up better with your expenses. If it stops working, stop charging them. Refund months they've already paid for that you won't be able to fulfill. Make sure they know up front that this service depends on EBay not being a jerk. That way you'll still get paid for however long you DO operate it, and not have to feel guilty about keeping the money when it stops working.
If 50% of the HN front page always was content about India and content people from India would be interested in, would you still be reading HN?

I know I wouldn't.

I do not believe it's about racism, are they really against people from India? Or is it just that they aren't interested in reading India-specific content?

Content of any type has it's target group, a flood of a specific type content on something like a front page will only be accepted by the target group, and the rest will feel like the site is all about that topic.
I'm not a Quora user but I've seen this issue occur on numerous message boards and online communities over the years. I have seen one default ban anyone the moderators think is Indian.

The real problem is the output: broken English & logic that is indistinguishable from trolling.

The reason why this seems to be an "Indian" issue is because of English literacy which is good enough to be usable, but with very poor grammar, at a massive scale. Other countries, be it France, Russia, or China, appear to have either English literacy that is either high enough quality as to be indistinguishable from being non-native, or it is just a tiny blip that goes unnoticed. I would suspect that "Indian" is the term many of the outliers of these other groups are being grouped in to.

Solutions? The ones that lump everyone in to groups based on their country of origin are the simplest. The least "racist" would be to divide the community down these lines, just as Google does.

The bigger question to me is, how are so many people learning English so poorly, but in a usable form?
Right, and the English was designed to perform the function that it does. Perhaps a sane implementation of the language would use far fewer characters.
Chomsky is a critical bridge between the ancient and modern, but credit for generative grammars belongs to Panini:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar

A good 2500 years prior. Chomsky was in the right place, at the right time, to carry that work forward into computer science. Not to detract, but the point is key: Sanskrt was formally specified 2500 years ago in a way that is recognizably a CFG.
If there is anyone from Stripe here, this is certainly not a good payment experience: http://c.kristian.io/image/0g331z470L2g

There is no way for the user to verify that the payment details are indeed sent over HTTPS. I wouldn't want to enter my payment details in a form like that.
> Are you coming from java?

Well, java was one of the languages I used before Ruby, but I've done more Ruby than Java.

> Read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing

I am well aware of duck typing, and rarely use either #is_a? or #respond_to?

That doesn't change that, if you have a reason to use that type of inquiry to check interfaces, #is_a? is the more safe of the two (more likely to reject an object that provides the semantics of concern and less likely to accept one that does not) and #respond_to? is the less safe (more likely to accept an object that does not provide the semantics of concern and less likely to reject one that does.)
As promised if you want to skip the whole setup you can download the configured vagrant box by doing the following:

- mkdir vagrant-hhvm

- cd vagrant-hhvm

- vagrant init

- vagrant box add hhvmdev https://www.dropbox.com/s/5qyjkes49nk5abt/package.box
I think the truth is more complicated - here is another account that says the opposite (from a Cambodian): http://frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/chomsky-and-the-khmer-r...

The point is rather is not that he is pro ONE particular horrible regime. Rather that he is quick to support ANY (or most) regimes that are anti-american, regardless of what it's actually like - such as Mao's China (in the middle of madness of Cultural Revolution), USSR, etc. The last article you quoted says exactly that - he is quick to support any 'underdog', regardless of if they are good or bad guys.
StackExchange does not compete in this space as they do not provide vertical instances of their site for general questions and answers like Quora, and have the overall attitude that such things are too open-ended and not handled well by their format (so when you see such questions on any of the larger StackExchanges, while there is always a flurry or really great and really valuable user contributions, the question is always quickly closed by moderators). If StackExhange wanted this space, they could probably own it very quickly.
Last time I checked, that didn't have proper tab completion, and didn't (by default) support any aliases I might have set up. I rely heavily on both.
I would say, just start! It's indispensable for exploratory data analysis for sure.
WebGL stopped working in Google Chrome on OS X 10.7.5 (2009 Macbook pro)
The bar has certainly been met with regards to phage as a food additive: http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/cf0559.pdf

The error rate of an E.coli DNA polymerase in vitro in <9x10^-6. Lambda phage, for example, has a genome that's about 48 kilobases in length. Which gives a mean error rate of 0.432 bases / replication. Ballpark estimate that the phage goes through 30 replications to produce a plaque, so we're talking ~13 mutations (it's a little different than that due to the founder effect, etc).

It isn't like a phage is going to jump Kingdoms and start predating you instead of the preferred host. This simply isn't a realistic risk, while the immunogenicity issues could be.

In terms of my own risk tolerance, I would have been comfortable drinking any of my own samples.
Iron.io HUD down
Weird. I had the exact opposite experience. Extremely easy to pick up, especially if you are familiar with both C and Python, since Python lists are fairly similar to slices.

Also, the documentation is far better than e.g. that for Java and C#: http://golang.org/pkg/io/ / http://golang.org/pkg/io/ioutil

Reading a file into memory is as simple as:

data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("filename")
While I'm not attempting to come off contrarian, I should say that trading potshots at government workers for potshots at government contractors seems short-sighted and highly hypocritical.

Having worked in both, I can say that both have their strengths and weaknesses. Where you would fault contractors though, I would generally fault the contracts themselves, or the faults of the contract overseers. Government contracting is adversarial, and where contractors have made major gaffes, in most of those cases you'd find that it was the government itself to blame. There's a reason it takes several hundred thousand dollars to be the lowest bid for standing up a standard Wordpress website, and I promise you, it isn't because the contractors don't know Wordpress.
Yes, I would like to be able to filter out Facebook content in a language I can't understand. Someone who doesn't read English should have the same ability. If there's a glut of activity about underwater basket weaving, for heaven's sake, I want to be able to get away from that, too. This is not hard to understand.

Anyway, your point about "no one is forcing you" is explicitly addressed in TFA. Apparently it's genuinely hard to get away from. If you have a counter-argument, let's see it. Otherwise, don't just rehash dead points and hope people will believe you the second time.
But they have not fixed the embed bug that prevents you from embedding IPython within another IPython session. I find the embedded IPython so useful during debugging. I really wish it could work from within an IPython session.
Sprint as two networks right now. One is the legacy iDen network they acquired in the Nextel deal, the other is their Sprint/Clearwire 4G WiMAX/LTE monstrosity.

The iDen network is basically analog, so transactions like presence and push to talk are binary and the state is always transmittable. The same cannot be said of IP. This is a problem we've spent a lot of time working on and I can guarantee none of the Big Telcos have a solution yet. So the answer is, the iDen network's PTT is basically analog and easy to manage whereas the LTE network is IP but difficult to manage. They want people off of iDen because running two networks is a massive waste of money.
Our call volume is too high for this system.

Starting pay for a 911 operator is about $26,000

Yea, obviously not as high a priority as stock exchange market where milliseconds matter!
Some variation of this topic comes up over and over again.

I've seen people bitch about Brazilians on Orkut, Chinese on WoW, Blacks on MySpace/Twitter, Indians on Quora and Android users on Instagram.

For all its potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous echo chambers. There's some threshold for these places where integration suddenly becomes a "problem".

I've occasionally wondered if the future of recommendation engines are systems which feed us a steady stream of what we want to hear and filter out everything and everyone else.
Software Development Mantras
Fitbark Fitness Tracker for Dogs Earns $30K on Kickstarter
How is this a shot at government employees? If anything, this is a tale of how government employees are bearing up under pressure that would have caused any of us to quit in under a week. The government employees didn't design the craptacular computer system that's causing these problems. That was designed by Intergraph, a private company.