skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, few topics are off-topic here if properly presented, including politics. I don't come to HN for politics, either, but that doesn't preclude my use of the site for other topics -- well, except for sensational situations such as when the Aaron Swartz bomb dropped, I have a screenshot around here somewhere where every single post on the frontpage was related to that topic. "Meh" I said, came back a day later, and it was down to 1/2, came back the next day and it was at 1/4 or less. Not that the topic didn't interest me, but god, it was a downright masturbatory vortex; though, I didn't throw a fit, I just let it die-down and soon enough we were back to the normalcy.

With that said, point being is that I didn't flag anything simply because there was "too much" of it for my tastes -- I don't believe, even as a participant, that I have the onus to try and dictate what others on the site participate in. Only if it's intentionally bad (spam, misleading, flaming, etc.) do I ever flag or downvote.

edit: And evidently I still don't grok HN -- why is my reply here "dead" as soon as I posted it....?
>You don't see professional musicians trying to play 10 different instruments on world level.

That's funny because most of the full time musicians I know can play 3-6 instruments really really well. Kind of like how most of the full time programmers I know can program in multiple languages really well.
Why not have both the original title and a separate editorialized version that can be modified/upvoted for accuracy?
I have no idea what this is or what 451 means in this context, but I'm upvoting this as a legitimate technical reason not to use 451.
Wow. I used to think that I was rigorous about security...
Grumpy old man thought of the day:

If Stripe is so easy, why do I need to buy a book and sample code?
Check my second paragraph, I quote some of things I like most in js as a language. Nothing there is exclusivity of javascript and many other languages implement the same features but I do enjoy javascript as a language and the fact that it is evolving, successful and ubiquitous helps a lot.
Do most people really need encouragement to be more self-centered and manipulative?
why is the declaration so vague?

So it can be forever.
Bill Gates, having done well, reached a point in life where he wanted to do good. His philanthropy has been exceptional, and he's motivated others to do likewise.

Today's crop of well-off tech execs now have a unique opportunity to do good -- take Schneier's challenge.

Although few could match Gates on financial scale, they have an opportunity to equal or exceed him on social impact.

I hope for the sake of the rest of us they do.
SQL Server script to adding an identity to an existing column
There's a lot of info around, especially documentation, but it isn't going to give a feel of actually using it. If you look around, you can find that you can run it yourself on a sufficiently old x86_64 Linux / in a VM, but it is a bit of a complex process.

I've asked someone else if they might respond to you with some further and more useful info. Hopefully they can!
I don't care about the tools at all, I just want to make things. If I can have something up and running in 5 minutes, great. I might enjoy it enough to dig deeper and learn something more complicated (maybe even a new language!). But if it takes an hour just to hello world, I probably wouldn't bother. These are just toys I might have fun with.

And I do know many other languages, I just don't want to learn a whole new one just so I can play with a new toy. Not everyone needs to be a programmer. Just because someone happens to know js doesn't mean they're interested in being the best programmer in the world.

Just because I enjoy brewing my own cup of coffee once in a while, doesn't mean I need to perfect the art of grinding my own beans by hand and crafting the perfect espresso.

I got into programming by playing with Lego Mindstorms when I was a kid. The building block coding interface was really fun and intuitive. "Oh no," a purist would sneer, "you can't code like that, it's horrible. Here, read this tome on C and microcontroller programming before you start." No thanks. I got to enjoy the end result immediately (making a fun robot), and then from there I could look further into making something more complicated, which ignited my programming journey.
Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford: Steve Wozniak at Oxford in 2008
Tailgaters vs. Couch Potatoes (Football vs. Futbol)
What I've always done is this:

Die a little inside when something you labored on for 18 months ends up being sold for half cost on Woot.

That's just me though...
Ask HN: Where to find beta testers for an OSX app?
For a new app that I'm building, I've decided to embrace the Lean Startup approach, and give out lots of beta copies in exchange for feedback and bug reports.

My question is where's a good place to get a around 15-20 beta testers to play with my app? There seem to be such services for mobile apps, but I can't seem to find a place to test out my desktop app.

P.S: In any case, if you want to play with the app (it's a very simple productivity app), leave me your email or contact me via my profile.
I can understand if this was the case for the single player campaign. Where there might be limitations in scripting the story for a female as well as a male character. But for multiplayer, the explanation is a bit more difficult to swallow. I'm not a game designer, nor am I CoD player, but wouldn't a texture pack be able to easily solve this issue?
Apple has a rule that disallows apps from the app store if they "duplicate the functionality of one of apple's own apps". Alternative browsers for instance are effectively banned, you can only skin safari. There have been plenty of examples where they have abused this rule. Google maps was around before Apple Maps, but when it launched it became the default app, and there is no way to change it. On android, the user can swap out gmaps for an alternative.

Luckily iOS never became dominant, and so the long term damage to the market is limited. In the short term, certainly a lot of developers made some quick money on iOS, and as one of them I can see why you are so keen to defend them. But in the long run, if they had reached dominance then it would have been a catastrophe for the industry on a scale far worse than Windows dominance in the 90s.

There are a lot of other reasons that it would have been bad, that often don't occur to people in cozy western environments, such as the impact it would have had on developing countries. A lot of elitist iOS developers say its not a problem that you can only develop iOS apps on a Mac, because "anyone can afford a Mac mini", but try telling that to a highschool student in India.
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A more accurate description of sociopaths can be found in Robert Hare's Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. This article seems to romanticize the term.
http://www.amazon.com/Without-Conscience-Disturbing-World-Ps...
iOS can do this natively. Under the accessibility settings, select "mono audio".
There's also the an opportunity cost to consider if your actual demand turns out to be higher than projected and you're not able to scale up to meet it.

I think we'll see more companies using a hybrid model where you can run your steady-state workload level on dedicated gear but with the ability burst into a cloud to handle peaks and flash demand.
That program is shocking. I'd be interested if there was even a need for threading, perhaps you could have just time stepped your actors with a simple Tick interface.

for all actors
actor.tick(timeDelta);
Information theory is a fundamental constraint on any halfway sensible theory of life. If you can't pump out entropy faster than it comes in, you will, by definition, be randomized, which pretty much by definition is not alive.

I know people think they're being sophisticated when they insist no limits can be placed on the form of life, but it's not true; it's naive. There are in fact certain very powerful and generic limits that can be placed on life with some powerful mathematics, such as the one I mentioned. It's fun to imagine a life form in science fiction that lives on the surface of the sun, but in reality they are not possible; there's no way they could retain any interesting structure in such a high entropy environment. To argue otherwise is basically to be arguing against thermodynamics. This basically puts this position firmly on the "crank" side, not the scientifically knowledgeable one.

Also, the idea that there are no limits on what life can look like is observationally false. The vast majority of places we look, we do not see life. Even if we manage to find a few simple life forms in a few of the slightly less hostile places in the solar system, it still won't change that fact; life is observationally not abundant everywhere, regardless of conditions. There definitely is a difference between conditions conducive to life and those not. Even what we call "extremophiles" are only surprising in purely local terms; in absolute terms in the Solar System, volcanic vents are still incredibly hospitable places compared to what is out there. In its own way, trying to argue from extremophiles to the general case is its own perversively parochial argument; the idea that extremophiles are actually "extreme" is a very terra-centric viewpoint.
Yes. This is it.
The Mathematical Atlas: A Gateway to Modern Mathematics
Interesting question being asked in the comment section I'd like to repeat here. Is it correct to call yourself a (software, web, backend, whatever) engineer without actually holding an university engineering degree?
"Our previous engine would not handle that. The way memory worked in the previous engine, it never would have been able to do that." Where is bullshit man when you need him. I don't believe this for a second. Great CoD puff piece HN.
I find the article repugnant; it glorifies selfishness.

> How to apply [rule #1 ]to your own life: Ignore "suggested donation" pleas at museums, always help yourself to more food and drinks at dinner parties and recline your seat all the way back when flying."

I wish this article were meant as satire, but I don't think it is.
>The OP implied that this was different-- as in an actual declaration of war. The cold war was never declared, am I right?

Exactly. And, perhaps more importantly, neither was the Cold War used to justify so many actions that would only be allowable in actual war time.
Ah, I'm in Northern Ireland. One of our main banks (Danske) issues Maestro as the only debit card option making it one of the most used cards here. Are there any plans to add support of has it been completely ruled out?

Edit: Did a bit of research and it looks like Danske is finally offering Visa Debit as an option.
I find the article repugnant; it glorifies selfishness.

'How to apply [rule #1] to your own life: Ignore "suggested donation" pleas at museums, always help yourself to more food and drinks at dinner parties and recline your seat all the way back when flying."'

I wish this article were meant as satire, but I don't think it is.
Bringing back OpenDylan's DUIM/Gtk
IANAL, but I know this issue. To protect an advertising slogan, the plaintiff must show that other uses of their slogan will confuse the public and materially injure the plaintiff's interests.

For example, there was once a restaurant named "McDonald's", owned by someone named McDonald. The restaurant existed before there was a McDonald's chain of restaurants, and the restaurant name corresponded with the owner's name. Notwithstanding all that, the corporate giant McDonald's was able to force the owner of the restaurant to change the name on the ground that the original name would mislead the public.

EDIT: I researched this further, and it turns out there have been several "McDonald's" restaurants that came to the attention of the corporate giant -- some legal actions succeeded, some failed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's_legal_cases

Defenses of everyday phrases like "It's the real thing" can only succeed if the plaintiff can show there is a real probability of public confusion or injury to commerce or reputation -- it's not enough to say that the phrase is in wide use. A counterexample is Apple Computer and Apple Music (the latter owned by the Beatles). In this case it was decided that, because they were in different businesses, there was no great likelihood of public confusion.
Honestly I don't think Haskell would have helped much here.

That code is terrible from a thread safety perspective. If the author didn't read up on how to write good thread-safe code, it's unlikely he'd read up on Haskell, so he'd probably write bad code there, too.
Or he could have picked a different software license.
It seems like a lot of people don't know that prior to the US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban controlled regions had reduced opium poppy production by 99%, which was 75% of the global supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...

Just a coincidence I suppose.
The research(both in this paper and the previous one at Usenix security 2012) is over hyped bullshit. The experiment was: remember this pin number to enter at the end of the experiment and then we show you numbers and look for a recognition signal. Or they check that you recognize an image of your bank.

This is just image/text recognition research from 1980's and 90's neuroscience regurgitated as security publications with far shittier experimental methodology and consumer equipment.

At no point did they actually demonstrate they got access to secrets you knew. E.g. your real PIN number and they certainly didn't demonstrate they could do so surreptitiously. There is no reason to believe you could actually do this and these experiments tell us nothing we didn't already know from actual real experiments done by real clinical researchers: you can use the p300 signal to tell if someone recognizes a specified stimulus.
If someone broke a $12m machine, surely their career would be over.

Who would you rather have working on your $12m machine, someone with no real experience with that sort of hardware or someone with plenty of experience and some painfully learned lessons about exactly how careful you have to be when working with brittle $12m machines.
Modern password hashing in PHP
Sounds like a great habit. If you're interested in advice, here's mine, although it might not be so much advice as just general thoughts...

You should be clear about the fact that meditation, for most people, seems to be very difficult. But I purposely say "seems," because it's not difficult in the same sense that lifting a heavy weight is difficult. It's more like how it's difficult to quit smoking when there's a pack of cigarettes in front of you.

Meditation, to some first approximation at least, is about simplifying one's mental activity. Attenuating the internal monologue or at least having a less obsessive relation to it. And acquiring a critical distance from desire, anger, and other phenomena that we tend to get caught in.

When the loopy chaos of thought-proliferation subsides, you begin to see some very interesting aspects of the mind (or of consciousness, of the present moment, whatever you call it). Buddhist philosophy puts a lot of emphasis on the nature of desire and the ways in which the mind is disturbed.

But the difficulty is that when you're sitting there with your mind fully available, it's extremely tempting to wander into thoughts. And once you notice this, of course, you begin to think about not thinking. Think about how you shouldn't be thinking. And so on ad nauseum. This is all just so much chatter and you shouldn't take it seriously. Not taking it seriously -- not grasping onto it -- is crucial. That means not beating yourself up over it.

The catchphrase in contemporary meditation instruction is "just return to the practice." And it can sometimes sound like a stupefying dogma. "Just sit," and so on. But there's a crucial truth in it.

It's kind of like running. At first it's just painful, tedious, and you feel clumsy and unfit. It's supposed to make you feel good, and sometimes it does, but it's also a chore and something you often really don't feel like doing. But after a while you start to understand more about it, understand your own limits, understand how to do it in a way that's functional for you. And then it kind of "opens up."

Running and other physical exercise has more of an obvious external reference point. It's easier to "return to the practice" when you've got your running shoes on and you're actually taking step after step. In meditation, this is one reason why posture is emphasized. Maintaining a good posture -- in addition to its more obvious benefits -- is also a kind of physical reminder of the mental meditation. And the breath provides something like the steps in running.

So a widely recommended strategy is to begin with a simple breath-counting style of meditation, perhaps sitting in the seiza posture, or one of the lotus postures if you're up for it, or simply in a chair with your back straight. There's plenty of decent instructions available on the internet, although it helps in countless and immense ways to have face-to-face instruction and to sit together with others.

Best wishes!
I posted it because I could not figure out how their reasoning actually made any technical sense. I suspect it is a total BS job, but maybe there is an actual technical reason.
Further, including comments in that tag cloud (styled differently?) might also be interesting.

Let me know if you submit to YC, I might join!
Exactly. I don't understand why there is such an outrage going on about Soylent. I mean, the guy is legitimately trying his best to achieve an idea he had which interested far more people than he thought it would. What's the matter with that?
Syrian Electronic Army hacks Washington Post Web site
> The ones referenced in the post I replied to.

The FBFs are complete foods. The others are supplements designed to help in cases of extreme malnutrition, or in cases of mild malnutrition.

>> Soylent have no dieticians on staff
>
> Yes they do.

(https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body)

Rob Rhinehart - CEO

Matt Cauble - COO

John Coogan - CTO

David Renteln - VP Business Development/Sales

Julio Miles - VP Customer Success

You'd have thought they'd list the dieticians.

I get no results when I search the Soylent blog. (http://blog.soylent.me/search/dietitian)(http://blog.soylent...

Please, help me out. Who are the dietitians on the Soylent staff?
As I said, it's a term they use. For example, see Vietnam, Gulf War, and Iraq War. Congress can declare war in different ways.

The last "officially" declared war was WWII, I believe.
That should be disallowed -- a company owning english phrases like "it's the real thing" or "just do it".

If it was up to me, I would allow only for trademarks in synthetic, non-english words. E.g "Soylent" or "Pepsi" or "McBurger". Not for actual english words ("Windows") or phrases.
Would that every platform had done what Golang did and simply wrap /dev/random. In the meantime, you have to make a choice: do you trust your language designer's CSPRNG AND the OS CSPRNG on which it (and the rest of the system) doubtless depends, or instead trust only the OS CSPRNG?
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So by describing socialism as orthogonal to taxation are you attempting to imply that socialism can exist without taxation? How exactly does that work? What does it in practice mean for "worker control of the means of production" to be enacted without violent centralised control administered by a political entity?

"Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications. And thus the off in the reeds tangential strangeness associated with private vs personal property, ad et al.
Quantum teleportation: Transfer of flying quantum bits at the touch of a button
Bought a copy. The PDF has the end of every line cut off :/

http://i.imgur.com/c4ZBUvq.png
Left-anarchists never managed to convince me how are they gonna have this society in which everyone is equal and has no private property without forcing people not to. I mean, if everyone agreed, I'd have no problem with that. But I surely wouldn't and many people wouldn't as well.
Yes, badges can so oversimplify and mislead.

From Wikipedia:

Democrat: is a proponent of democracy

Republican: An advocate of a republic, a form of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship

Libertarianism: a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.

All of them sound pretty great to me, to the point I could easily choose to be a republican libertarian democrat. Heck you could even probably be a republican libertarian democratic anarchist.
The major advantage of JSON is a readable syntax. XML tends to be overly verbose, and therefore not as easy to read.

That's pretty subjective. For example, I find XML to be far more human readable than JSON.
Kyle Bass believes the Japanese will default, despite their ability to print their own currency. He was successful in shorting MBS, but his Japan fund has never been correct.
This comment (from someone who preordered early on) explains: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6217734
but what's is the use of their less restricted api if there are no users on it? Also I didn't think twitter has ads does it? even if it did I've never noticed much which means its not intrusive in any way.
Mercedes Is Testing Google Glass Integration, and It Actually Works
Missing: UI Engineer
I'm curious, could he (or you) have written a program in any other languages (like Go) and not have worried about these issues?

Honestly, I got some mild goose-bumps after realizing the number of Zeroes that 12 million had.
Female avatars existed back in Tribes, or even Unreal Tournament. I'm not a CoD player, but I'm frankly surprised that there wasn't an option. I thought this sort of stuff was a _given_ today. Guess I was wrong.

Anyway, this may be a "puff piece", but anyone with half-a-brain can figure out how much of a jackass move this was on --EDIT-- Activision's part. Why did it take so long to create a female avatar?

Hell, Halo gave a nod to female players by making female spartans inside of their famous armor. (ie: Nicole-458). You don't even _need_ texture mods to officially play as a female in a lot of these games, lol.
hopefully the code they posted was not theirs.
That, and the Scientology advertisement scandal:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/1...
Under debt to power producers, Spain imposes levies on solar power homes
I thought it might engage them first :) - we shall see.
You repeat the self-serving propaganda of the US as a charity. ("We spy on you to protect you!") When you say "If a Japan in shambles was the goal", that is a non-sequitur, because I explicitly said Japan is "doing reasonably ok because we let it". So being in shambles would not be the goal.

This is an example of mechanically quoting arguments we're told to believe.

If you'd like to learn more about post-WWII US planning, simply look up the Marshall Plan and George Kennan. If you're able to deal with dissident lit, this may inform you: (http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/dd/dd-c11-s03.html).
Why not? If someone hires you to be an engineer and you succeed, then go for it. In the end I think what matters most in what you call yourself is the confidence you have in your skills.
What a vapid article. Let's not medicalize being selfish. True sociopathy isn't something that can (or should, in my opinion) be emulated. Pretty low-brow pop psychology clickbait. But it got me, so I guess there's that.
You inadvertently stumbled onto the punchline of the joke - "You can't cross them because a mountaineer is a scalar." (scaler) - works better when spoken.