skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Homophobia in the Middle East and Africa has gotten ten times the media coverage of homophobia in Russia, so I'd say the premise is wrong. Russia is getting attention right now because they just passed a hateful law.

I'd never seen any coverage at all of homophobia in Russia until a couple of months ago, when that new law seemed to come out of the blue - so I'd ask the question: why hadn't we heard more about homophobia in Russia?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uganda+homosexual
I am playing with Octopress (which uses Jekyll) tonight and it looks amazing.
You may be interested in the Fledgling Languages List: http://fll.presidentbeef.com/
I don't see anyone arguing against pseudonyms for forums, internet communities, or anything else that's separate from your real life. Hobbies are indeed sacred.

Google's stance with Google+ is pretty clear: this isn't the place for internet lives and internet friends. This isn't a forum, or Reddit, or HN, or any of those things. It's a place, like Facebook, for people's real identities to engage with each other.
Search the RubyGems API from within Alfred
Is this the future? You buy a device but the manufacturer actually owns it?
Sometimes the best that a company can hope for is death
Pflugerville is $65, Round Rock and Cedar Park are around $100.
> Microsoft when Balmer took over had one direction to go: down

Not at all. As mentioned here in the Vanity Fair [1] article, the iPhone could have been a Micosoft product and now brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft. Ballmer said "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." If you cut through everything else said, I think this is pretty damning.

[1] http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mo...
Sorry, I'm aware it's dead. I didn't think there was much information exposed, but I thought it might have included where you logged into (that might depend on http/https?).

Anyhow, maybe it's because it's Sunday but it's very disappointing to see this getting so few comments. Especially when it seems like just a few months ago the "Look at our amazing innovative password-less email login flow is!" that got so much attention, when this is the much more mature and future-friendly version of that idea.

Cool work, I'd never considered outsourcing auth stuff before, but this is something I'd consider using and paying for.
On the Clay thread a while back, people liked my list of systems-oriented languages that I've been compiling for a while. I can't go a good copy-paste and edit job on my iPad, so I'll just link to the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6117456 . A bunch of other people came in with updates and other entries for the list. Included were of course Clay, Nimrod, Rust, and D, but also Deca, BitC, ATS, Habit (a Haskell dialect), and others.
An insightful and balanced article about Steve Ballmer. But the author goes seriously awry in the last paragraph:

"Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize."

Actually not at all. The best way to serve shareholders is to not focus on profits more than you absolutely must, and instead to focus on doing things insanely great.

And there is a personal lesson as well. I like money as much as the next guy, maybe more. But I know from experience that my best work is when I don't think about money at all, when I think about pleasing clients, and creating great stuff, and changing the world.
Imagine if they hadn't been hell bent on only releasing those tools for Windows. Imagine if they had made them cross platform.

Their programming tools may be great. But I will never care. Because I'd rather hit myself with a stick than use Windows.
I hope this didn't come across like an impatient rant. I just wish them a quick path toward advancing state of the art ideas about DOM rendering and parallelism.
Build them.
At a minimum, you should use at least two availability zones if you care about high-availability on AWS. The vast majority of issues (including the current EBS hiccup) tend to be limited to one AZ.

For us, today's outage triggered a bunch of alerts, knocked 1/4 of our USE attribution servers offline (we're in four zones there) but otherwise caused no impact. Mostly just acked alerts and twiddled thumbs waiting for situation to resolve.
It is actually true. Unless both these engineers were lying to me when they described their jobs. (Or unless I'm confabulating or hallucinating, I suppose.)
It becomes important to fast path the
low hanging "can't optimize" condition checks and bail out as early as possible.
Ah, the old "other people are doing it too!" excuse. Russia has actively launched several anti gay initiatives recently, and subsequently repressed the protests from that nation's gay community. Therefore the criticism in the west is more about supporting an ongoing struggle than suddenly one day realizing that Russia's gay laws are backwards. I suspect the same criticism would be leveled against, say, Iran if that nation were in the middle of a crackdown on the Iranian gay rights movement.
There is going to be invoicing protocol in the next Bitcoin version. Let's see what kind that will be.

Other than that, money before Bitcoin has never been a communication protocol, but a centralized database where the database keepers benefit from network effects & locking in the customer to that specific database. So it is pretty obvious IMHO that no good protocols have been developed around it.
SQL Server and the 'feature' was still present in version 2003, not sure about version after that.
Factor supports both dynamic and statically-unbalanced stack effects, but the former risks destabilizing the runtime and the later requires that defunctionalization (read: inlining) ultimately resolve to a static, balanced stack effect. It's all documented quite well in subpages of that article I linked you to.

In practice, all of the unbalanced stack-effects will become trivially balanced at word boundaries & dynamic stack-effects only occur when metaprogramming.
I understand, but the author of this particular article actually does know better and usually gets his statistics right.
I've worked on this problem for the past ten years. The solution would be to build line item data into the payment networks according to one standard or another. Unfortunately, the established payments companies have prevented startups (such as mine) from doing so because it's not worth it to them. They make a fortune from their existing, aging infrastructure. So we're stuck with the old networks until the courts fix the mess of unconstitutional laws they've set up to guard their profits.
This is very true; however c2nim distinguishes between #def and #define for this reason and this helps a lot. #def means c2nim needs to expand the macro, #define means it's some macro that should be translated into a Nimrod template. Coming up with heuristics to do this #def vs #define distinction automatically seems to be quite easy and might be implemented in a later version of c2nim.
if you want a safer EBS, create a raid ontop i and use snapshots.
Language and social signaling
I think spinners are absolutely worthless on the internet, they tell me next to nothing. I could be looking at it for another second or it may keep going indefinitely. A progress bar, no matter how bad, can tell me there is progress being made.

The spinners are more suitable for local apps like games and operating systems. If I see a spinner in a game, I know it hasn't frozen and should eventually finish loading.
Unfortunately, this was patented by Namco in 1995: http://www.google.com/patents/US5718632
Agreed.

Argument #1: Forcing user to shift cognitive context is bad.
Argument #2: In-built browser progress bars are good.

If you accept #1, #2 is wrong. If you accept #2, then #1 isn't as big a deal as you say it is.
Unsung Heroes
What they don't tell you is that this method takes a long time and generates huge files unless you used a patched version of qt. I've been meaning to write a blog post on this.
Compared to most other animals, human babies are born more helpless and dependent on those around them (for example, most other species have young that are able to crawl or walk already).

I believe the theory I've heard goes something like: It was beneficial for humans to start walking upright, but that development puts selective pressure on having a narrower pelvis for increased stability. Having a narrower pelvis implies having a smaller birth canal, which in turn puts pressure on having a shorter gestation period.
And a quick look at the charts indicates Amazon.com has been delivering respectable shareholder gain, despite it famously being managed for the long term.

The author ignores that people price in their view of the future of a company, and Ballmer's Microsoft isn't viewed as having a great future. Very possibly not even a good future.

In fact, if this parody of how Microsoft was being managed was correct, all these billion dollar new market effort flubs wouldn't be happening and the stock just might be doing better. At the very least the unprofitably invested money could have been returned to the stockholders.
You always discuss an issue based on the specific case that raises the issue, but that doesn't mean there is automatically extreme selection bias going on. The relevant facts of a case are rarely unique. I've seen a dozen or so of such cases in the past ten years and I've never heard of a case where this kind of retaliation worked.

If I report that my green car was stolen and claim that a gang stealing green cars is active, then people respond with "That's unlikely, they're probably just stealing every car they can get their hands on". In line with your argument, they should instead say "Wow, a gang stealing green cars, how unlikely. How wonderous I would stumble upon this case of extreme selection bias here on the web".

That is even ignoring the fact that it is probably illegal. You are allowed to end the delivery of a service if the other party effectively cancels a contract, but you are not allowed to keep delivering the service in a way that breaches the contract. You cannot just serve any content you want on their domain (unless this situation was specifically foreseen in the contract).
There has been active Neonazi groups in Russia since the 90s, with gay bashing and attacks on non-whites. But it is a point, my example might be wrong since media coverage do differ.
I agree.
I really like Racket because of the powerful match function, which can do more than Haskell, for comparison. It's like very powerful ViewPatterns.
Well it is pretty heavily subsidized...
So will Google cover anti-fraud and chargebacks, if I'm not allowed to do that myself using strong tools?
It would be nice if your site had more information about what exactly people are signing up to.
This sounds interesting. I'll check it out...have been thinking about an iPad anyways because it has good support for virtual baordgames :)

Thx
Regarding the comment count drivebyacct2 mentioned, I consider it a good sign when a story has a high upvote/comment ratio. 32/6 (soon to be 7) is pretty good.
Err, why? It's fairly easy, and you get so much for free: portability, compiler optimizations, easy use of C libraries, easy interfacing with other languages...
> I consider it a pretty solid platform and the IDE is like the golden standard in the industry.

well... in the .NET echo chamber ecosystem, sure. I haven't done serious .NET stuff in a decade, but it was 6-7 years behind the (free) java/jvm IDE's then. I understand it has gotten much, much better but people I know that are current with it and actually use other ecosystems too generally prefer the choices and prices of those over VS. (eclipse, intellij, sublime text, textmate, webstorm, and so forth)
I am not the author, but I write most of my grad-student research-project-quality code in CL. Here are some things I have experienced so far:

1. Pure dynamic typing is a headache. I use type hints quite frequently, tend to use defstruct rather than cons, etc. SBCL has a pretty good type inference system and gives very useful compile-time feedback about types.

2. Macros can help improve organization and code re-use when used properly. Macros can also turn code into an unreadable mess when used improperly. The only way to learn what is "proper" is experience / practice; books like On Lisp and Let over Lambda help but you really do need to get your hands dirty.

3. Debugging across an FFI is really painful. The debugging tools for Lisp are fantastic, the debugging tools for C are fantastic, but those tools compose poorly.

4. I wish the standard allowed map, reduce, and similar constructs to be defined for arbitrary sequence types. There is more to life than lists and arrays.

5. I wish the standard came with more useful data structures. Associative lists in CL are great if you never have more than a tiny number of items in them; an associative tree type would be a great addition. It would also be nice to have a standard priority queue type, a standard random-access list type, etc.

6. Performance is easy to underestimate. SBCL does a bang-up job of optimizing code, with a few exceptions. The optimizer in SBCL could use some work, of course, but it is nowhere near as bad as people seem to expect for a high-level language.

Overall, I think what CL is desperately in need of is an updated standard. The world has changed a lot since CLtL2; we need a CLtL3. There are a lot of non-standard libraries that are widely used and that should just be standardized -- MOP, generic sequences, an FFI, etc.
If you care about uptime you should really get off EBS (and services that depend on it like ELB and RDS). Having a network between your disks and your CPU make outages like this one inevitable.
If only we could get decent numbers from Samsung

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de...
We're not quite Mad Max yet. Perhaps 80% of the country lives in an area where water is not scarce enough to prompt water table depletion or aqueduct building. "Water politics" in these areas mostly consist of bureaucratic squabbles regarding the minor expense of water treatment facilities & pipe-building, or soft-science environmental debates about erosion, fish, and effluents - things which can be reliably consigned to the higher end of Maslow's Pyramid.

About half of the remainder of the problem could be solved easily by ending this stupid obsession for English Country Manor lawns well outside a climate zone where they're viable, and prohibitions on all but drip irrigation for agriculture. These could be mostly accomplished without legislatorial nitpicking by simply making prices reflect scarcity, permanently. We seem to have an innate resistance, politically, to pricing water to reflect its infrastructural and depletion-replacement cost, to admitting that some mechanism needs to scale back use.

Some issues are simply not solveable, it's true - isolated water tables that have been changed by taprooted invasives are probably never going to revert to grassland, and need total cessation of irrigation activities to avoid desertification. These cases are relatively rare though.
SQL Server behaviour is: If you have a "select *" view and then add more columns to underlying table, columns will not show up in view until view if refreshed

Thats not too bad, and it does not get the column names mixed up.
I watched that all at the time and it sure seemed to me that it was primarily IBM's fault, with Microsoft benefiting from it being so wedged.

A lot of Microsoft's success in that era was due to its competitors simply dropping the ball while it executed at least minimally well. Now it's frequently executing poorly and in new markets its got some much more competent competitors ... and ones you can trust more.

Yes, MS does have a very big problem here, I just don't see OS/2 as being a good example of it.
I think you could probably replace "Steve Ballmer" with "Tim Cook" here. From my perspective, Apple seems to be all about the profits. Wasn't it under Tim Cook that the first dividend in decades was paid out to share holders?
You mean like Bitcoins?
US government is not amused.
Power relies on control.
He says its a myth, then admits it isn't a myth.

In conclusion: Clickbait for DBAs
The one suggestion that I'd add to this is to play hardball. If you force the city to use eminent domain, the bank can only get paid a fair market price if they can demonstrate a clean chain of title.

As a number of scandals have shown, they will be unable to do so for a significant fraction of the mortgages, and they know it. They will scream, but push come to shove negotiation will be in their interest. And they know it.
payswarm is building monetary & transactional schemas/data-models. they have json-ld underneath, and jsonld has some interop with RDFa if you want the other declarative content format (html). https://payswarm.com/specs/ http://digitalbazaar.com/payswarm/

i'm less familiar with the other ideas floating in the Web Payments working group, whose charter is to chart the standards serving what you describe.
http://www.w3.org/community/webpayments/
Not sure I understand the quotation. Who is the one driving a cart and horses through the law, is it Wells Fargo or Richmond?
Yep. All the good once are stuck playing *craft games.

Find a modern 8-year old, who understand PC circuitry (at analog and digital level), seen manufacturing processes, can re-solder components, can write C/assembly, can develop basic useful applications (like, say MS Paint). I bet you could easily find one like that, back in 70s-90s, particularly here in the silicon valley. Now - I'm not so sure.
Richmond is the most depressed city in the Bay Area. It's a horrible place. I spent time there in the early 80's and it was bad then, but it's a lot worse now.

Given the federal government is going to do nothing about the problem, I applaud the mayor for creative thinking. I don't think it'll work, but maybe it will spur someone into a more reasonable action.
For $2 I will resize one image.

For $4 I will resize an image so that it's too small to view properly.

For $2 I will resize it so that it's retina-friendly.

For $10 I will replace the image with one of a puppy.
Look up "OS/2 Microsoft Munchkins" for one example of the unethical tactics I mentioned. And yes MS worked with IBM on OS/2 2.0 early on.
Around 2004-2005 Steve Ballmer made a quick visit to my country (Romania), met the PM of the time, and surprise, surprise, not 6 months later it was announced that our Government would invest in equipping all the country's schools with Microsoft machines.

Fast forward to a more recent time and it is revealed that Microsoft might have indeed been corrupt all this time ("is being investigated" is the politically correct term), but, like any big company, it probably bought its way out of the scandal: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/19/u-s-investigates-micro...

So yes, for me as a Romanian citizen Microsoft is still an evil company.
To add to the list of reasonable reasons for discontinuing products, there's also the question of relevance. If WebM support is added to some future IE version (not out of the question if WebRTC in its current form catches on), will the WebM plugin get added to that list? That's exactly what happened with things like Google Desktop, which I used to love but became completely superfluous when windows added a decent file search. Not everything needs to last forever, especially for desktop utilities and libraries, where the most useful tend to be folded into the OS itself over time (see: "sherlocked").
If I taught full stack RoR dev in SF for $30/2 hours would you come?
I can't see it as anything but satire.
I don't believe that Samsung or any Android manufacturer has caught Apple in profits. All the numbers we have seen is from Samsung are dubious at best.
Richmond. What they're doing is flatly unconstitutional, as the article mentions.

And it's an old American tradition to consider bankers as "the Devil" or strongly in that direction. This has even provided what's very possibly our best bit of political rhetoric, "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech)
Obviously illegal and will be struck down in court.

Heres the issue- Bankers created the housing collapse, as far as the homes value is concerned. By allowing many 'liar loans' that started defaulting, we exploded with foreclosures which flooded supply without demand. As a result, home prices went down. It does not change the fact that a percentage of the people getting hurt by foreclosures are those who lied in the first place. Yes, your home value went down. Provided they were in a 30 year fixed (the vast majority were, since they were being resold to fannie/freddie) your payments did not go down, OR up. If you could afford it on day one, you should still be able to today.

Basically, this is comprised of many people who lied to get their mortgage and as a result, their home values went down (but their payment is the same as day one) but since their homes are down in value they stop paying.
The bank should have never loaned these people the money in the first place. You should have never been in this house if you are getting foreclosed on now.

*this comment is not applicable to all situations, but a common occurrence.
Eminent Domain is a backwards concept born out of a different time, and needs to be removed from the powers of the state. Look at cases of abuse such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London

There's nothing stopping the state from using Eminent Domain to overreach and ruin businesses or move people out of their homes for their definition of "public good".
Samsung profit share has nowhere near caught up with Apple.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/27/samsung-has-not-de...

Looks like you've been taken in by misinformation.
Hanging Ghost Prank
I'm in CompBio and the sense I get is that it's a lot easier to get someone to try your tool if all you have to do is provide them the jar which they just have to click on and it runs. Whereas with compilation, you first have to make sure you have all the platforms covered and then force the potential user to select the right executable for the platform.
Exactly. If there's probable cause to believe that there's information on the phone that may be related to a crime, getting a warrant should be easy. If there's no probable cause, they have no business searching the phone.
> "Ballmer did exactly what our capitalist system dictate he do: he maximized profits to the benefit of Microsoft’s shareholders. The implications of suggesting he was a failure are far more profound than most of his many critics likely realize."

I'm not sure I get this point. Are Apple and Amazon not also running successfully under a Capitalist Marketplace?