skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Which government do you live under that subjects you to an "annual mugging"? Do you really not see a relevant difference between taxation and being forced to give up your money at gunpoint?

I live in the United States. If I do not pay my taxes, I will be kidnapped. If I resist kidnapping, I will be murdered. This is why I pay my taxes. I do not pay my taxes because I want to kill brown people on the other side of the planet, or because I believe that a government has a right to unilaterally create obligations on my behalf (and for ten years after I renounce my citizenship!), or because I believe marijuana users should be locked up and sodomized.

Given that we will not rid ourselves of taxation in the near future, some ways of spending that money are better than others, and it's worthwhile to talk about that. There may even be a few policies that are so beneficial that they justify theft.

Edit: I suppose the actual useful difference in perspectives here is about how the policy debate should look. I believe that each policy decision that increases or maintains spending should have to overcome the weight of the injustice inherent in funding it. Many other people believe that there is no such injustice, so policies that provide only a mild benefit when compared to privately allocating the same funds should also be implemented.
_utm.gif is the generic way that Google Analatics communicates back with its servers---there's no rest API.

So if you're doing things like event tracking, without counting the event as a page view, then you'll still see another request to _utm.gif

They appear to have one normal _trackPageView call in the header, then one or more other calls coming from within minimized JavaScript files.

Here's one:

_gaq.push(["_trackEvent", e, t, n.toString(), parseInt(r, 10), !0])

This is the signature for _trackEvent

_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

!0 evaluates to true in javascript so this event is marked as non-interactive, and thus doesn't count as an extra page view and won't be used in bounce-rate calculations.

Presuming the other calls are identical, then their reported bounce rate should be correct.
Super Advanced Python presentation (PyOhio 2013).
thanks for the <3
Thanks! I've been planning on writing something about it but just never found the time. The shader is actually quite simple, although the implementation is pretty tricky (need a lot of hacks to get it working in Unity).

All it's doing is lighting each tile individually. It's a throwback to the per-tile lighting of ascii roguelikes (http://osx.iusethis.com/screenshot/osx/brogue.png). So each square chunk on the wall gets a single amount of light and color evenly distributed on it. That's it. Also, there are shadows on top of them.

The props (torch and statue) have a banded light shader on them. It's just standard diffuse lighting but clamped to a certain set of values.
Assert.IsNull(null);

It's easy to make unit tests pass. To defeat this kind of gaming, you'd need extensive code review of the unit tests. But that circles around to your point: when you look at code there's something that tells you whether it's good or bad. That algorithm can't be based on passing tests, because tests are code too and also need review.

If you had a team of completely selfless developers, you could probably have code-reviews and peer-reviews drive incentives. But as soon as the team suspects it's a zero-sum game and they're competing for a limited prize, they're going to stab each other in the backs, and your best developer will be the prime target. That'll make your best developer leave, and the next-best becomes the target, until all you're left with are lousy developers who are only good at office politics.
Higher education's product-delivery system—a professor droning to a limited number of students in a room—dates back a thousand years. The industry's physical plant (dorms, classrooms, gyms) often a century or more. Its most expensive employees, tenured faculty, can't be fired. The price of its product (tuition) and operating costs have outpaced inflation by multiples.

Why is this the case? Is teaching basically the last great guild?
There is an oxygen reflex as well, but it's not as powerful as the CO2 reflex.
No, we as a society only care about children. You're the most precious and wonderful thing until you turn 18, then fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
I wonder where that leaves XFCE and LXDE?
The reason it was discovered in the first place was that coins were suddenly disappearing from wallets. So it's very likely that someone has already set up a bot that scans new transactions from the same address for repeating r values.
Does any of that extra information make its way back to the English Wikipedia?
Here is the entire talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2KZJzoz-qI :)
He just learned the lesson that you have to follow the path of "Continuous Visible Productivity" to get up in the hierarchy:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/21/how_to_get_paid_more...

You better learn something from that without turning into a douche.
Why not shuffle and give advantage to the government? Make the someone being the collective people?
some 400,000 women are rendered unconscious and subsequently raped each year

This is unbelievable. If this is true, and assuming most of the victims are not repeat ones, it stands to reason that almost every woman that goes out drinking for more than a few years will be raped. How can there be that many rapists out there?
A quick look at the pinout for the cards shows a 3.3v line, so it simply draws power from the host device.
Show HN: PixGix - create animations with your webcam using media stream API
This would be great if drink spiking was an actual problem, but the overwhelming evidence is that in most cases the victim simply drank too much alcohol and then blamed their subsequent problems on their drink being spiked. (Your drink being spiked also provides a socially acceptable excuse for being out of control in a way that irresponsible alcohol consumption does not.) Furthermore, better detection & prevention of drink spiking will only serve to exacerbate this problem, as young women will have less reason to monitor their alcohol consumption, safe in the knowledge that their drink won't aid in their subsequent abuse.

The way to prevent substance-related rape is easy: (1) don't drink excessively and (2) drink with somebody who will look out for you, preferably someone who is sober.
Authority: The One Crucial Element Of Internet Marketing
Your GPU powered up? I would assume this renders in CPU, so that's a bit strange.
> I’m a teen living in New York. All of my friends have social networks — Instagram <snip>

Isn't Instagram part of Facebook?
Are you assuming no repeat rapists?
> basically you will have to know how to compile from source, know some gcc, etc.

If you're happy with the system-wide Python, try apt-get install python-numpy next time.
One of the things that's unnoticed by all but true geeks is that when two of the protagonists sit and have a chat, they're actually sitting on a Cray Y-MP. And it's never mentioned.
This seems the complete opposite of your usual advice to use a library. You want every app developer to memorize the intricacies of which of random or urandom or srandom they should use on which OS and whether they need to worry about blocking or short reads and whether the entropy returned is good, or really good, or just good enough? You don't think people are going to dick that up? I'd trust the OpenSSL devs to figure this mess out before John Q. Random developer. Any day.
Top 400 Python Projects on Github
Oh, mine is an AO756, with a Celeron CPU so it can handle XP like a breeze. Your Atom CPU isn't very comparable, so I'm not sure what you should expect. ElementaryOS is on par with Ubuntu performance wise, although seemingly snappier compared to Unity (I always use openbox wm with Ubuntu). If you're looking to improve performance, you could try Elementary, but Lubuntu or Ubuntu with openbox would be a safe bet.
Actually, I don't think the import * in numpy is anything else than historical artefact. Numpy just happens to be one of the oldest, still widely used python library (considering numpy started as numeric), as you point out. As for import speed, have you considered using lazy import in your script ?

I don't see numpy being integrated in python anytime soon. I don't think it would bring much, and one would have to drop performance enhancement that rely on blas/lapack.

I think installing has improved a lot, and once pip + wheel matures, it should be easy to pip install numpy on windows.
Good.

EDIT: My overly clever pithiness that doesn't add to the discussion stems from having seen too many similar posts for every social network or mobile app since the early 2000s. Any service that relies heavily on everyone buying in will eventually lose steam, in part for cultural reasons[1] and also because other companies find areas where they can improve and desires that hadn't been tapped yet.

So, for a big social network to survive for decades and become an entrenched part of everyone's lives, it has to become like infrastructure. I suppose one way to do that is to continually buy new hot companies, as Facebook did to Instagram. Instagram too shall pass.

But when I read the headline, I did wish her friends were just finding new interests, and the new interests were taking too much time and leaving none to spend on FB.

[1] Imagine that Seinfeld was still being produced to this day.
It blows my mind that I can switch between the three different renderers without dropping a noticing a single framedrop. I had to open the devtools and verify that there is actually a change happening to believe it.
Unless Bloomberg is coercing internet providers into handing over his emails and getting secret court orders to record his web traffic, it doesn't seem like a very good comparison.

Investigating people, especially those with any kind of political, economic, cultural, academic, or other influence, based on publicly available information and whatever people are willing to tell you if you ask, is a pretty traditional part of American public life. There's no right to force people to be disinterested in what you do and refrain from writing articles about it, as long as they collect the information by legal means.
Quantum Mechanics: Ph.D Thesis of Paul Dirac
A bit of history on this:

All APNG has ever really needed to build a sustainable momentum is--like most other web features--a plurality of web browser support. These days, that usually means "supported in both Firefox and Chrome." Until that happens, nobody has any reason to create APNGs, because you can't stick them in your cutesy forum signature and expect other people using the website to see what you see.

Firefox already has APNG support; Chrome is the hold-out here. It's mostly because Google only want to use the "official" libpng. libpng, though, is intentionally a minimalist reference implementation! The PNG group will never accept the APNG patches into the official libpng, because that would distract from libpng's purpose in being a reference for how to encode/decode PNGs. And Google don't want to apply the APNG patches themselves, because that means, basically, supporting their own fork of libpng.

In other words, what's really been needed this whole time isn't "better authoring tools" (create consumption tools, and authoring tools will follow) but rather for some large organization to get behind maintaining and supporting a regular release of "current libpng with apng patches." Big enough, at least, for Google to feel as confident in their work as they do the PNG group's.

The easy solution, of course, would be to split out the work Mozilla is already doing in maintaining their "current libpng with apng patches" from Gecko into a separate project, and let both Mozilla and Google (and Apple and Microsoft and whoever else) be consumers for that project. If there's anything to get done, it's that.
Mega to run ‘cutting-edge’ encrypted email
There is multiple reasons for this, and none of them support the conclusion that "government-run" healthcare is better.

The Current US System is the Worst possible system a culmination of decades of government interference in both employment laws which is irrevocably linked health "insurance" with employment and turned "insurance" into a services prepayment pozi scheme.

Government run systems control costs by having a Fixed Budget, which means each year they outlay X dollars, so if for example there are 100,000 Hip Replacements budgeted for the year, and your Number 100,001 well your SOL. This is called rationing... this is one way government control costs. the other is ignoring or limiting patents for drug companies, so drugs cost less overseas then in the US. There are 1000's of things like this that make the government run systems appear "cheaper".

Cost is not the only factor though, Quality of Care is very important and the US still has more Health Tourists than any other nation... there is a Reason for that.
You can ask enigmail to look at three or four different key directories if you don't have someone's key saved locally.
Cool tech, but what bar owner is going to buy these?

Assuming they cost more than regular glasses, why would you want to advertise the fact that your glasses are Roofie-proof? That's a creepy precedent to set
Ultimately, I'm not complaining, because buggy software is great in the context of devices that try to prevent you from doing something with your own property. I especially encourage people to write their system-level software in C and use lots of strcpy calls. It ensures that I can root my phone even though the carrier doesn't want me to.

Reminds me of claims of deliberate backdoors. Of course, these can often be used for bad things too.
No, everyone includes all the people who live in a district that complain about too much government and object to things like national curricula or accounting standards or whatever. That can include bureaucrats but isn't necessarily limited to them.

This sort of thing is one of my interests and I even sort of enjoy digging through budget documents to root out these nuggets of information. Financial analysts and people like that do it too, but most of the general public is just not all that interested in such details. I used to think that if you simply put the information in front of people, a lightbulb would pop on over their head and they'd start demanding fiscal accountability. Turns out, much like environmental, development, and other long-term issues, that a lot of people feel overwhelmed and just tune out completely.

If it was just a matter of making the information available, then The Economist would be the most widely read newspaper.
Does what we're fighting against even have a name?

If you don't have a name to reference something with, you give it one. PRISM is fine except insofar as using it would let the government go "oh we've reformed PRISM, nothing to see here" while continuing all other kinds of malfeasance.
Is spiking of drinks really that common? I've only ever seen GHB or Ketamine used recreationally. I've never heard anyone say they'd been intentionally and maliciously dosed, although I've seen people ingest by accident.
Platform as a Service and the Network gap
Tweeting washing machine
I think it's owned by, and integrated with partially. I'm pretty sure Facebook saw this coming (kids parents having Facebook, so kids no longer thinking it was cool), and that's why they jumped on the sale of insta.
> Is spiking of drinks really that common?

No, I doubt that it is because rape is relatively uncommon.
Show HN: Do you read on the toilet? This web app is for you.
Wait till she gets to college... then the value increases substantially.
Is there any chance you could extract the audio and put it online somewhere? I am currently finishing a cross-country bike trip, and would absolutely love to listen to his keynote, but only have a phone on me currently. It would mean a ton!
Does it matter if its common? If its something we can prevent, why not?
I agree. I have a 13 year old and she has a facebook account which she doesn't use.
If you read the article, it effects around 400k. I'd say that's 400k too many.
I read this particular part with great interest

Facebook is also a big source of bullying in middle
school. Kids might comment something mean on a photo of
you, or message you mean things. This isn’t Facebook's
fault, but again, it does happen there. If my mom heard I
was getting bullied on Facebook, she would tell me to
quit right away.

The power wars have caught on Facebook too.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/3256331.stm
See also:

Paul Dirac's handwritten notes for his PhD, the first ever on quantum mechanics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6002173
Colin, and it was here, we heard it first:

"...of Gaussian proportions!"
http://www.crunchzilla.com/code-maven
https://www.khanacademy.org/cs
I like this bit best:

I love Facebook, really I do... I think it's a great idea for a website, and I wish Facebook the best of luck.

Utterly dismissive. Facebook is some kind of niche website for grandparents.
I'm 30 and have plenty of 13 year old friends on facebook.
> The problem is not that I don't know what philosophers think about, the problem is that I do -- see deconstructive postmodernism as one entirely typical example.

It seems that is the only branch of philosophy you are familiar with, because what you are doing is generalizing your misinformed notions of one school of thought and applying it to an entire field. A good critical thinking philosopher would not do that, or at least be so sure of himself while doing it.

> "Simply put, it's the idea that there are no shared, objective truths and that everything is a matter of opinion."

This is beyond out-dated as a useful school of thought. Again, If you read Kant and Popper, they outlined why thinking along those lines is impractical and unproductive, which clearly you seem to agree with.

> You left out the part where scientists use gathered evidence to inductively shape and then test falsifiable theories about the evidence, a critical step without which it's not science.

This is true, however like I said, sir Karl Popper was the one that entirely defined this notion of falsifiability you're talking about. Furthermore, something can still be 'scientific' if it follows the traditional scientific method, but a proper scientific theory cannot be formed without valid falsifiability.

And to go back to your previous response:

> Is it your position that only those who have taken philosophy courses are qualified to criticize the field?

No, but it would be much more productive for society if people were more open to understanding the fields they hold strong opinions about before resorting to make misguided generalizations about them. This applies just as much to attacking philosophy the way you are, as it does to people who argue against vaccination/GMOs/whatever; anti-intellectualism is anti-intellectualism. Arguing as if from a stance of higher intellectual ground while making straw-man arguments everywhere is not a very fruitful argumentation technique.

Like I mentioned above, it seems you actually largely agree with a large important branch of philosophy here, yet you don't seem to be aware of it and are dismissing the entire field. 'Thinking Critically' has been thoroughly thought out by many philosophers throughout history, and that is what led to both Science and Mathematics; Philosophy wasn't just some fanciful step-cousin of literature, it's entire purpose was to formalize thought with the aims of eliminating the illogical.

So again, if you actually are interested in understanding why what you are saying is misinformed, please do read Popper at the very least his 'On the Sources of Knowledge and of Ignorance' and 'The Logic of Scientific Discovery' papers, because his thoughts are still prevalent in modern science and I think you will largely agree with them.
I think that implying that people not following your viewport are not 'human' is a pretty far leap...
> all the people still arguing in favor of dynamic typing at all, are tilting at the windmill of static languages without type inference

Some of us who argue in favor of dynamic typing have a much more nuanced and informed view...

I, for one, am of the mind that the there are precisely zero production-caliber statically typed environments that possess a sufficiently powerful type system for the kinds of problems I tackle on a regular basis. Haskell doesn't count, since you need to turn on about a dozen GHC language extensions in order to incorporate the last 20 years of research. There's also quite a bit of design warts that newer academic languages are starting to iron out. In particular, I don't think monad transformer stacks are a reasonable solution to computational effects.

That's not to say you can't write any program in an environment where the type system is constraining you. You can. You simply implement a "tagged interpreter", which is something that's so simple to do, people do it all the time without realizing. Either you have a run-time map or you pattern match on an sum type data constructor, then loop over some sequence of those things with a state value threaded through. Poof! You've got a little interpreter.

I find that this happens a lot. And, I also find that a lot of problems are easier to reason about if you create a lazy sequence of operations and then thread a state through a reduction over that sequence. Now, in Haskell, I've got a type correct interpreter for an untyped (unlikely turing-complete) language! Sadly, I can't re-use any of the reflective facilities of the host language because my host language tries to eliminate those reflective facilities at compile time :-(

I'm in favor of optional, pluggable, and modular type systems. I think that a modern dynamic language should come with an out-of-the-box default type system that supports full inference. If, for some reason, I build a mini interpreter-like thing. I should be able to reuse components to construct a new type system that lets me prove static properties about that little dynamic system. This level of proof should enable optimizations of both my general purpose host language and my special purpose embedded "language".

Additionally, I require that type checking support external type annotations, such that I can separate my types from my source code. In this way, type checking becomes like super cheap & highly effective unit tests: The `test` subcommand on your build tool becomes an alias for both `type-check` and `test-units`. You just stick a "types/" directory right next to your "tests/" directory in your project root. Just as a stale unit test won't prevent my program from executing, neither will an over-constrained type signature.
Someone from my what to program my what?
> The way to prevent substance-related rape is easy: (1) don't drink excessively and (2) drink with somebody who will look out for you, preferably someone who is sober.

Maybe some people want to drink excessively (1) and with friends who also want to drink (2). For that matter, if you want a really easy way to prevent rape, why not just lock yourself alone in a room all day?

An excessive comparison, perhaps, but I think we shouldn't be so quick to blame the victim here. The thing is, people should be able to drink excessively on occasion if they want to without having to justify it. It's a problem with society that needs to be fixed if they can't do that.

And whether you personally intended it or not, comments like "the overwhelming evidence is that in most cases the victim simply drank too much alcohol and then blamed their subsequent problems on their drink being spiked" are misguided (victims, by definition, don't need to "blame" anything other than their attacker). Also, citation needed.
You can try a little experiment... Cut a slim slice of ham and put it over something red. See for yourself.
Yeah, I just checked the movie, at 1h:03m, they are indeed sitting on it, I snapped a screenshot @ http://i.imgur.com/xb8E2zn.jpg