skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some things are just so big that it is unlikely a company or startup can start and finish. Society really cannot function without both public and private contributions. The proportions of each determined by your flavour of politics.

Cases in point are things like the British railway, roads, the NHS or NASA. In our own industry it is open source software or things like CERN and the donation of the WWW we enjoy today.

You need both. They tend to flip flop too, we nationalise something because we think that would be better. Then we privatise it and maybe at some point in the future we nationalise it again. We cannot seem to escape that both are necessary for healthy society.
But there is also an issue of freedom and trust. Sure, you could provide "endless happiness" by making everyone stoned, but what freedom that is?

The point isn't to implement majority rule on every micro decision; people are often generous enough not to be control freaks. But again - when they are not, then it probably isn't just a "micro" decision.

Your last sentence was exactly my point. If such a dictator is going to win every election, why he needs to be a dictator? Why we can't just have those elections? By this, you also gain trust.

I love Linus Torvalds quote: "People can trust me [about kernel development], because they don't have to trust me." I think it's true everywhere - trust is only gained if you have choice not to trust.
Governments have the benefit of being able to take on lots of risk and have a very long term perspective; maybe we'll get to Mars in 2040, a private company couldn't wait that long and spend that much.

The only companies who have been successful in long term research have had some kind of market dominance that was eventually tempered. E.g. AT&T Bell Labs or Microsoft. There are arguments out there that companies shouldn't become successful enough to do long term research, it doesn't really fit into a healthy dynamic market. Then you have companies like Google who are very successful in leveraging publicly funded research (self-driving cars...).
The guy who first thought of using tables for layout lamented this back in 1997 in "The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It": http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s1.people.html
They have ~60 pages:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:vatican.va+inquisition

And much more with the new (1965) oficial name:
http://www.google.com/search?q=q=site:vatican.va+Congregatio...
How does this work? I am surprised that you could be allowed to keep (and in fact still be part of) your current job when you are supposed to go to prison.
The craziest client requests ever
I never really got into it. Now I use Evernote pretty heavily.
Do you have any side-by-side benchmark comparisons of haml and slim? Not saying you're mistaken, but I'd be interested in those metrics.
Governments are most effective when they are competing, just like private companies; e.g. USA vs. Germany/Japan in WII, USA vs. Soviet Union during the cold war. These days, we are kind of at peace with countries...even China is just a big finicky panda bear right now.

We've replaced are bogey men from a well-defined Soviet Union to a bunch of people in caves who blow things up randomly with IEDs. Well, this war has given us great drone technology at least, but competing with people in caves doesn't give us as much.

It would be nice if we could replace our obsession with competing with each other to achieving hugely ambitious goals like colonizing the moon or Mars. I'm doubtful this is part of our collective nature, though.
Rompelberg was towed up to speed by the vehicle (physically attached) and then unhooked and maintained the speed. That is different than pedaling the bike up to speed yourself.
NSA by the numbers
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/
http://www.quora.com/Front-Page-of-Hacker-News/When-is-the-b...
I don't have good answers to your first two questions, since they're very open ended. I can give you my personal experience regarding the second two.

* Would Python's dynamic type system make it more suited to problems with dirtier less clear types when compared to Haskell? If you know both Haskell and Python, do you divide your potential programs into "Python programs" and "Haskell programs"?

No, I classify my potential programs into "Haskell programs". I haven't missed Python once.

* When one writes Haskell code, do they really not have to debug and test their code?

Haskell programmers still have to debug and test, but I find it somewhat easier than I've found it in other languages.
"Finder app again presents exactly like Finder in Mac OS, but with tabs"

That's retrogade copying: http://www.apple.com/osx/preview/#finder
Why not VLC?

I suppose mplayer and its forks are good for cross platform.

On Windows, and if you ask me, the best experience i have now is MPC-BE. Which is based on MPC-HC, which is based on MPC.
You can do it like this, though:

set go-=T go-=r go-=L
The best tool for social media
In central Europe teletext is still supported by all TVs and broadcasting companies. A lot of older people read the latest news via teletext. The browsing effect is similar to HN, it shows just the news headlines and the interface is text only - no fancy graphics or ads. With a single button press you see a short summary. That way you can read the news of the day in less than 5min - something that is hard to achieve for Joe Doe with the internet.
A healthy side effect of high frequency trading
If you're interested in the topic, check out ihpva.org (international human powered vehicle association). They have a regular speed test in battle mountain, nevada where the fastest speedbikes do time trials (without drafting). It's inspiring on both a physical and engineering level. Current record is around 80mph.
I've heard that our British friends across the pond drink a lot of tea. Is 2 liters normal? That comes to over 8 cups in the US.

I ask because I drink a lot of tea (10+ cups a day). No ill effects on me except some jitteriness. This seems to be an atypical amount of tea consumption in the US. Is there a good reason to rein this in?
Show HN my weekend project: Paranoid Browsing
All I see is a rehash of bad science arguments regarding "calories", that have been roundly thrashed in Gary Taubes excellent book 'Why we get Fat'.

Oh and also, a "Stockholm Syndrome"-like kow-towing to the corporate food giants. Makes me wonder, what horse this author has in the race?
We are developing our official WP plugin at the moment. We are bound to have something to show in the 1-2 weeks from now.
Amen! For example, what is the practical advantage of using <footer>, <aside>, <artice>, <section>, today? I only ever hear "search engines or screen readers can/could do X", that but nothing about what any user agents or bots actually do. No examples, and no way for me to detect any difference it would make anywhere (other than having to include HTML5 shims for IE). That doesn't do a lot to get me interested in paying attention to that stuff, to move beyond "does it look how I want it to". In short, don't tell me what I should do for the robots, tell me what the robots are doing for me (or other people), with that stuff.
Interesting that the vim docs say nothing of order.
There are a bunch out there, but here's one:

https://github.com/klaustopher/hamlerbslim

Also on a different note, Slim supports http streaming while Haml does not.
Lets not forget the polymaths in this analysis.
How running prepares you for startups
Crypto library authors seem to have taken the philosophy that "it was hard for me to learn all this stuff, so it should be hard to use". Since I started working on the cryptography library that lvh mentioned I've seen some absolutely amazing APIs from crypto libraries:

* Undocumented error conditions (actually in general the documentation is atrocious for crypto libraries, "crypto is easy, why would you need docs"?)
* ECB as the default mode for block ciphers
* Ignoring invalid parameters
* Allowing you to provide parameters which basically your cryptography a no-op (e=1)
* Modes whose purpose is undocumented, merely "This mode should not be used"

And finally, absolutely NO python crypto libraries expose AES GCM. (This is all to say nothing of the myriad of other issues I have)
> But that's the point: when people or animals are placed under controlled conditions specifically to measure changes in mass vs caloric balance, it all averages out as expected.

No, that's not the point at all. Whether something is causing a greater appetite is the point.
Here is this month's intro course by Conor McBride:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ok259/agda-course-13/
Sure the NSA can do that. But this kind of monitoring is accessible enough that even the smallest agencies and local governments can enjoy the same powers to abuse our privacy.
Hidden in the payment page is their "micro" option of $10/mo. Not quite PAYG but still half the cheapest option they advertise.
IMHO its worse then that, the system (The political parties, the media, electoral systems etc) has moved in such a way to make people not give a shit.
Anonymous’ Secret Presence In The U.S. Army
The protocol mismatch problem during updates and the derivative protocol messages idea were very interesting. Also the multicast part.
It's evolutionary. If the industry keeps trying, and nobody complains too much about this particular implementation, then the advertising industry can continue pushing the boundaries. In-store tracking is too much for now, but if bin tracking turns out ok, then bin tracking can help justify in-store tracking later.

This is an industry-wide version of what Facebook has been excellent at doing alone.
This is surely one of the most irresponsible pieces of legslation nywhere this decade.
There's no need to get upset. Writing clearly and coming up with good names are hard, and routinely take multiple iterations to get right.

I run into this all the time while coding. There are times when I get lazy and use a function or class name that I know deep down is not right, and a code review will catch it, and then we'll spend 15 minutes mulling over a better name. In this process though, we are forced to think deeply about the problem being solved, and often gain extra insights. All from a couple of words!
Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Don't listen to the haters. Nothing even comes close to the level of marketing Facebook can give you to your target audience...and it's cheap! Enough said
Things That Make Cool Drivers, Cool
Wow. What's with the intense elitism here? Have you taken a philosophy course before?

The article was clearly arguing in favor of the general public learning to think critically. I'm not sure what your agenda is for completely dismissing that, but it seems you're harboring some misconceptions about philosophy. I mean, where do you think the concepts of logical fallacies and the scientific method were born? I highly recommend you read the works of Karl Popper (the father of the idea that scientific theories have to be falsifiable) if you really want to learn about the importance of philosophy in the sciences. Not to mention the equal importance of social sciences (that Popper himself defends), albeit their limited ability to define scientific theories (as Popper defined them).

Bacon and Kant might be useful prerequisite reading as well if you really care to understand the context and importance of these epistemological advances. But to dismiss the entire field with snark (like it is so commonly done on HN) is just in bad taste and exhibits exactly the lack in critical thinking that this article was taking about.
Tracking devices hidden in London's recycling bins are stalking your smartphone
Karl Popper - Uncertain Truth [video]
I'm wrong!
It's quite amusing how accurate this is, knowing Haskell users across a number of these levels. It's quite a handy learning tool as well with the added explanations at the bottom.
Come to think of it, at one point in the not-too-distant past I did see a fair few new-ish comments with zero points instead of one, where I couldn't see anything about the comment that was objectionable enough to be worth downvoting.

I don't remember what my response to those was - probably I just figured that someone was having a bad day or read something into the comment that I wasn't seeing or something.
Much of what is attributed to a native taste for surveillance was exported from the US. So there are multiple layers to the problem: How much are Germans offended at the NSA? Do they see the BND tainted by the NSA? Is this a propaganda move to preempt that taint? Is any nation in the West other than Iceland really capable of retaining full sovereignty and self determination in this issue?
Yatra.com forgets to renew the domain
Normal mapping question
Lots of the people I've worked with that I've respected have been members of the IEEE they seem to have quite a few programmers and all the ones I've met have been excellent.

Even met one of these once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certified_Software_Development_... he was a scarily good software engineer.
The only thing I regret is that valuable thoughts go to waste, in the sense that, since they're not stored, they can not be endlessly discussed, improved and ultimately result in real solutions.

For me any discussion has the ultimate goal of improving things. Even if it takes a long time.

I tried to explain that here, regarding only 1 specific topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935
Homeopathy and Marxism: Why bad ideas don't die
I tried quickly with a PNG screenshot, and found that the result was bigger than what ImageOptim could do. It seems to me that you're not stripping color profile information, you might want to check it!
It's a great way to drive that particular business out of the state.

If they apply this tax towards STEM education, then the benefit might be worth it.
Nurturing Lean Startup in the Enterprise
Guess whose emails the NSA can't read
I doubt people really know ON/OFF by reading the text. More of a sense of alignment. In India, you don't have text on the switches. Also, it's opposite to the direction of the switches in US (Pressing down is ON). Further, if you have 2-way switches there is no way of labeling them.
Doesn't the same thing happen in the US? Didn't At&t just announce a new (opt out) privacy policy?
- program one "External marketing & analytics reports" - ..."for example, we might provide reports to retailers about the number of wireless devices in or near their store locations by time of day and day of week, together with the device users' collective information like ages and gender."
- program two "relevant advertising including wireless location characteristics" - "we're currently creating a new 'wireless location characteristic' that will help us use local geography as a factor in delivering ads. location characteristics are types of locations - like 'movie theaters. people who live in a particular geographic area might appear to be very interested in movies, thanks to collective information that shows wireless devices from that area are often located in the vicinity of movie theaters."
The Mouse That Called Home
I think this is interesting and singular because it came from Harvard and the title was not edited by me. Also the post was flagged but upvoted at the same time. I don't know many articles that fit in this pattern.

Probably people thought it came from a radical author since similar articles attract discussions instead of flagging.
This seems so obvious to me that I really do not understand how can anybody not see that. Is the difference between a man fighting with other men (where other men are obviously part of the race) and someone hiding behind the car not clear? Maybe it's because I used to race myself and I have been influenced by 'cycling ethics' - hiding behind the car was considered 'cowardly' and only tolerated under very special circumstances like when you had some technical difficulty so they had to give you reserve bike and now you are compensating your bad luck and getting back to the peloton drifting behind your team's car.
I guess that, unlike Google, there is not $$$$$$$ at stake in refusing to comply.
There is a different perspective on the frozen APIs. Using an API from the stdlib gives you the certainty that your program is not going to break with a minor python version bump. This might not matter for all software but is crucial for others.
Since the "original" mentioned at the top is not available anymore: http://web.archive.org/web/20071020011113/http://www.cse.ogi...
They should create a tax for lawyers. They are far less productive than engineers -- all they do is argue all day and not create anything of value.
I understand that building racing bikes is his profession. I am not trying to be sarcastic here - I just really do not get what is cool about a bike builder building a bike which (to me) seems to be not so special (if the bike were able to do 80 mph without the car... then I would be smitten).

Obviously, I might be missing something. And apparently... many people admire that guy and I don't want to be a 'killjoy' - everybody doing their job well and with enthusiasm deserves admiration and I respect that.
It's nice to see a renewed interest in developing mplayer. Do you know if there are plans to get it packaged by the major distros?
this is cool. anything like it for Firefox?
edit: looks like there is one called "Trackmenot" but that it has not been updated in a couple of years.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/?s...
What a mess. At this point I'm not inclined to sell to anyone in the state.
"~200 MB less than Ubuntu's", not 200 MB. It is over 700 MB.
This is going to increasingly become common esp as governments try to cover budget gaps. We just went through a sales tax audit for our SaaS company and so are expecting a good size bill for taxes not paid + penalties. Yes - fun stuff.

Honestly, the gov't folks are playing whack-a-mole here trying to keep up with fast-growing areas that don't fit the old "you sell this widget for $X" model they're used to. And so they're going to write overly broad rules as they don't understand technology and related industries. There is no intrinsic reason that SaaS should be free of tax and so the more worrying aspect of this legislation (NY has similar) is that it is so difficult to understand and open to interpretation and the mental tax it imposes on businesses who live in a cloud of of uncertainty about how they should treat their revenues.

That said, I think the idea that it will drive biz out of the state is naive. California is not a particularly biz friendly state in terms of taxes but the Valley and even LA seem to be doing just fine.
MAC address number of device needs to be mapped to the name of the person whose contract includes the device. I'm not sure how an advertising company would go about doing that.

MAC address is stored apparently so device movement tracking past other bins & in and out of shops can happen. As suggested in the article some qualities of the owner of the device could be inferred.

Possibly irrelevant comment: I bought a pay as you go mobile broadband dongle in a UK computer shop recently as I wanted to access internet from a location with no wifi. Paid cash (as it happened, I tend to for smallish transactions) and topped the device up in a newsagents' shop with top-up card that came in the box, again cash. I didn't realise we could still do that. I've since topped up by cash machine so there is an audit trail now.
Satire often bites deepest, and being made to look ridiculous is what draws some of the harshest reactions from tyrannical dictatorships.
Those famous Emacs users
Lighting strikes SUV as Utah family drives through rainstorm
Recovering Bitcoin private keys using weak signatures from the blockchain
So if almost anyone can do anything if they really wanted to, then applying your logic - no one would do anything.
Which is really annoying if you have existing clients in the state. It is really poorly worded and confusing, my tax attorney has no idea where our work product falls tax wise.
This is cool but I'm not really sure if I like the "opinionated" design aspect of it all. The terminal application is drawn with a slight level of transparency that you can't seem to (easily) turn off. I like my terminals like my coffee in the morning.

Also my first port of call was to remove Midori and install firefox.

I must admit though, the interface is a lot lighterweight than unity and much better in my opinon. Whenever I install Ubuntu on anything I immediately remove unity and install gnome-classic.
Was there some new patterns since the last decade (the page updates stopped in 2001) ?
He still bothered to produce a biography of himself.
Show HN: A pseudo commandline photo organizer
To be fair, the ubuntu system settings panel is practically the same.
I feel the same, but lately most ebooks I looked at were a couple of EUR cheaper than their paperback counterparts. I think the publishers/vendors are learning.
I stopped working with a client already over this. Simply put, cash-flow wise I can't currently risk taxes and penalties. It turned a customer into a liability because of the horrible wording and unclear guidance (seriously, they want us to pro-rate by the % of our software used in the state?).

I suspect many other small start-ups will make the same choice we did until this all gets sorted out.
Wow, so if I run a SaaS from, say, the Netherlands, I'm going to have to pay Massachusetts some kind of extra income tax? What if I don't even know where my customers reside?

The US just became a little more EU. Congratulations!

EDIT: I meant 'import tax' where I wrote 'income tax'. Sorry for the confusion.
Q - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_%28James_Bond%29
Until people realize that all taxes are theft, they're doomed to have new taxes imposed on the most productive of them. It's really a simple test to see whether taxes are theft or not: if there was no way for IRS to find out how much money anyone made, would people still be paying taxes? My guess is that 90% of people who preach about the social contract and helping the poor would keep the money.
What is emerging, then, is not a truly symbiotic ecosystem of innovation, but a parasitic one, in which the most lossmaking elements are socialised, while the profitmaking ones are largely privatised.

Yes, this is a real problem, especially in biochemistry right now. It's not that the intellectual property moves over (because government can't own a copyright) but that the people do. There are a number of cases where a researcher in the public sector discovered something and, instead of putting it into the public domain (where it belongs, since the government paid for it) he went to work for a pharma company on a 500k+ salary, which is essentially a finder's fee for IP worth $100M++ to the company.

I don't know that this can be solved completely, but I think that (yes, I am going to advocate for more government spending) salaries should be raised to be comparable with, at least, the industry average in the private sector. (Obviously, government can't match the private-sector high-end.)

I agree with the general insight of the article.

Now, there's a second-order effect that is poorly understood but extremely important. Startups were more innovative in the 1970s than now. Why? Bell Labs and Xerox PARC were in their heyday. The public sector paid only slightly less (10-20%) than private. Academia wasn't the jobless shithole it is today. To get people to leave their jobs in basic research, companies had to compete on autonomy and interesting work. The result was that, even to get in the game, people had to come up with more interesting and better companies.

The general lack of autonomy for technical people in 2013 is why the Zyngas exist today. There really isn't that competition. Sure, the large tech companies offer free lunches and one massage per year, but the work is usually so managed and uninspiring that they aren't putting up much of a fight.

Doubling down on high-autonomy, basic research work, no matter who does it, government or private, is good for society. It means that the startups that do claw their way into existence will have to be better.