skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to disagree with one of the final conclusions of the article. For me, at least, it's far easier to imagine life without Apple or Amazon than it is to imagine life without Microsoft.

Say Amazon goes bankrupt tomorrow. All of their products stop working over night. Many people are upset because you can't get things as cheap, but for the most part they go to other online retailers, of which there are many. The Kindle is pretty easy to imagine life without, as are most of the other services. AWS going black would frustrate much of the web, but most of that could be taken up by the litany of providers in that space.

Apple is a little trickier, but to my knowledge (take with a whole shaker of salt) they don't have a huge ongoing set of services, and most Apple skills are pretty transferable to other *nix style services. If anything, I could imagine that Linux might get a whole lot of extra designers. The iPhone would be missed, and there would be some havoc as people rush to alternatives, but it doesn't do anything truly special that an S4 or equivalent doesn't do. The iPad would be missed also, but it's the same story.

Microsoft though has its fingers in so many pies that if it disappears over night it would basically stop much of the planet. There are a lot of devices running Windows Mobile still. There are loads of applications in use that simply won't run on anything but Windows. Millions of people that don't have the skills to use anything but Office/Windows. Earth without Microsoft would be drastically different. Outlook/Exchange is huge also. There are masses of IT staff that would simply not know how to use anything else.

Now, that's not to say that they haven't done a lot of work to take themselves out of that position. Windows 8 was, as I think everyone here would know, a train wreck. There are developers developing for the web, Android and iPhone that 5-10 years ago would have been developing applications that would only have run on Windows. I just don't think either Apple or Amazon have the irreplaceability in so many fields that MS does.
This is the most intelligent summary of Ballmer's tenure I've seen. It falls back on more facts and numbers than I think all of the others I've read combined.

As technology people, we look at companies through a different lens than investors, shareholders and the like. We want to be impressed, we want to be given a new toy that disrupts existing markets and allows us to develop software in some new way, but that isn't the only way to make money and create value.
"Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money."

Heh. You really think any successful tech company has ever had a mission besides making money? Some of them talk big in their first few years, but they never follow through and they get embarrassed and try to sweep it under the rug pretty quick. Remember when the RealPlayer company was called Progressive Networks, because it was supposed to "provide a distribution channel for politically progressive content"? Remember "don't be evil"?
My site, next to my email address, specifically says I do not want to be contacted about off-shore development, SEO, electricity contracts, etc. I get a lot of spam about these things regardless, including from locals who've manually gathered email addresses and not just bought a list.

There seems to be no recourse against many types of spam.
There are quite a few very performant languages like that. I would like to list two, ATS and Felix. I commented on Felix today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274322

A good HN day for language enthusiasts.
An essay in the book What Ifs? of American History (Robert Cowley, ed.) by Robert L. O'Connell, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust," details what might have happened if Arkhipov had not been successful and the Randolph had in fact been hit by a nuclear torpedo.

In the aftermath, the U.S. military executes air strikes on Cuba followed by an invasion. The Soviet forces obliterate Guantanamo with a nuclear strike, send nuclear cruise missiles at the incoming invasion force,and, most seriously, manage to launch two of the SS-4 missiles...one of which hits Washington D.C. and wipes out the entire National Command Authority. In response, U.S. forces execute the entire SIOP against the Soviet Union, an effort which gives "overkill" a new name.

The aftermath of "The Two Days' War" includes the near-extermination of the Soviet Union, radiation issues in large parts of the world, and a "nuclear twilight" causing worldwide food shortages and famine. Ultimately, the United States was viewed as the aggressor by the rest of the world, compounded by the actions of President Richard Nixon (elected in 1964, replacing Acting President John McCormack). The U.S. stood alone in refusing to join the Geneva Convention for the Abolition of Nuclear Armaments in 1966, and renounced UN membership in 1968, ordering the organization out of New York City. The American public felt Nixon had taken the wrong turn, and elected Eugene McCarthy to succeed him in 1972.

The essay is written as the report of an investigative commission written in 1972 and finally declassified in 2002, in part by the actions of U.S. Archivist Newton Leroy Gingrich (who never went into politics in this timeline) at the New Capital District in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.
> I would consider saying "please reply to this message to unsubscribe" easily accessible, legitimate, and free.

You're missing the point that by replying, the recipient establishes a relationship with the spammer -- he confirms that his is a working e-mail address, and he invites more mailings to that address. This is why security professionals warn to never reply to a spam e-mail.

"Don't Reply to Spam - Spam Control Tip":

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/don't-reply-spam.html

"Don't Respond to Spam: Here's Why":

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376031,00.asp

> I think spam is more complex than just saying "spam is spam".

It's very clearly defined, so there's no mystery about it. That's why I say it that way.

> Anyhow, I have one more question: can any message that is sent without automation (i.e., I type the message specifically to a recipient) be considered spam?

Yes, of course it can. Why? Because if that were accepted, spammers would hire poor third-world people to type out spam messages at one cent per message or less. Therefore, any unsolicited e-mail, meaning sent to someone who hasn't invited it, is spam.
The linked article is pretty Gruberish. If you don't like analysis of an opinion piece, perhaps this was the wrong comment section to read.
I've just done the first week's lectures and exercises. They assume you know Java, but if you don't you're pointed in the right direction for suitable resources.
I think you are missing the point. If a government wants to seize a property using it's eminent domain powers it has to pay "just compensation" for that property. The Supreme Court has interpreted that to mean fair market value.

If there was a CDO pool that included only mortgages based on houses in that particular town, perhaps the whole pool could be seized at once, based on the fair market value of all tranches of the CDO (although there might be tricky jurisdictional issues). However, that's not the case. The mortgages are spread across many many different such pools. So rather than one big eminent domain case, there needs to be a condemnation of each and every mortgage separately. That being the case, the city must pay the fair market value of each mortgage -- not the the FMV of an abstract average house.

The single biggest problem with the city's proposal is not that it is underpaying (though it likely is in most cases) but rather that it is trying to claim that every mortgage can be fairly valued using the same simple formula: 80% assessed value of the underlying asset. Simply put, that's nuts.

The second biggest problem is that Freddie and Frannie have already said that they won't refinance the written down mortgages. So the city would have to hold the mortgages to maturity. They don't seem to have anywhere near enough capital to do that, and I don't think the muni market would be terribly interested in financing such a scheme (or the litigation!). Especially not with Detroit making everyone nervous to begin with.
i've always felt that had i discovered euphoria earlier in my programming life, i would have really liked it. these days i'd miss all the features more recent languages have borrowed from lisp and/or ml, but it would have been an awesome second or third language (after basic and c).
Last commit 3 months ago. Do you know if this project is still alive?
Even if you support consuming UBL or an other HTTP like format or anything really, tracking expenses will continue to be a Hard Problem (tm).

I ran expenses for a fairly large producing organization this summer. I got large stacks of unorganized and under-descriptive receipts every day. Including receipts from flea markets, amish bakeries, and more. Not to mention PO purchases, check requests, petty cash withdrawals, partial returns, returns to cash, and more.

No matter what, more than an automaton, you need someone who understands the business process. You need someone who can look at a receipt and not only know how much was spent and on what SKU, but what that actually item is for, and if it's a valid expense.
Must be fun working with you. For anyone looking in the comments for the tldr; dont bother, just some "experienced" old fart venting about the kids having the same argumemts he had when he was younger. Complaining because they wont just take his word for it and have to have the argument themselves.

I too thought it might be actually about a discussion going off topic when juniors are involved and maybe a tip i did not know how to get it back on track.
The US is chopping up pieces of SOPA and trying to pass them, again.
Not only did the NSA spy on the UN, but Hillary Clinton instructed State Department employees to spy on the UN. Here's an article from Der Spiegel from 2009 that I stumbled upon:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/diplomats-or-spook...

And this spying by the State Department may have provided the NSA with the information they needed to do their own spying:

"The State Department was also particularly interested in the UN's internal communications facilities. In her wish list, Clinton wanted to find out everything possible about the organization's telecommunications infrastructure and also extensive information on "current technical specifications, physical layout, and planned upgrades to telecommunications infrastructure and information systems, networks, and technologies used by top officials and their support staffs." The intention seems clear: This information would make it easier for the National Security Agency, the US intelligence agency responsible for wiretapping of phones and interception of electronic communications, to easily attack telephone, computer and e-mail accounts."

This information came from the diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks by Bradley Manning.
These meta-posts have become so frequent as to become irritating. It's compounded by "self" posts seemingly being weighted positively in the item ranking algo.

Why can't you email info@ycombinator.com as per the guidelines?
I like the idea of justifying ratings, but that can still be gamed, unless justifying ratings is one of their explicit performance objectives. At one of my jobs, managers had to provide more justification for the very highest and very highest ratings. So my boss told me that I deserved the highest rating, but he didn't want to provide the extra justification, so he gave me the next highest. And he confided - unprofessionally - that he knew (as we all did) that someone else in the group deserved the very lowest rating. But again, he didn't want to do the extra work, so he gave him the next to the lowest rating.
The following works without issues, for whatever reason: 'select *'
Not sure why "you can just use the DOM inspector" is so often accepted without question. Why does the DOM inspector happily show you a password?

Shouldn't the browser be keeping track of those it has autofilled and prompting for a password before exposing them there, too?
> Prescriptivists demand a difference between less and fewer. Those poor fools have lost!

Yes, I agree it's a lost battle. I also don't generally prescribe. But I make an exception for this and a handful of other usages, with the understanding that I can't tell people they're wrong -- which, if you noticed, I didn't do. I instead give both definitions and invite the recipient to choose between them.

My other recent pet peeve are the many people who say "reign in" when they mean "rein in". Reigning is what a monarch does to a kingdom, reining is what a cowboy does to a horse.

But these are annoyances, not a matter of right versus wrong.
The offer of kUSD 150 in cash for a title to a house valued at kUSD 200 in Richmond, that the bank needs to realize a steady stream of income from, doesn't seem unfair outright. What I mean is, where are the creditworthy buyers in Richmond? The town is failing and not getting any better.

What is always troubling is the interaction between municipal authorities and venture capital; their interests do not intersect, and there is little experience in municipalities with complex financial deals. The showcase piece is the Birmingham, AL sewer disaster.

The idea of eminent domain is appealing, and the real-world implementation is another problem.
here is how I like to do it :

from pyquery import PyQuery as pq
doc = pq('http://google.com')
print doc('#hplogo')
> ... but doing to with sarcasm and disrespect ...

A little sarcasm, but no disrespect.
> What the 7th Amendment actually said is "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

That's the fifth amendment.
It look substantially similar to COS 226 at Princeton, also taught by Kevin Wayne, which uses this textbook: http://algs4.cs.princeton.edu/home/
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I see your point. I didn't think of the iPad because, although I have one, I don't do much general browsing with it. E.g. I use the Bloomberg app to connect to their site, rather than use Safari.

I surf very little on my iPhone, a bit on my iPad, almost all on my Macbook. Why? Because of screen area. I love being able to crank the font size up to 18 points and still be able to see a decent amount of screen real estate.

Just something to look forward to as you get older. :)
I am not sure I understand a hosted "authentication protocol implementation as a service" product.

When's the code being released, and what's it written in? :)
Come on, that's not really a scraping problem, it's more of a text parsing problem coupled with an API lookup or scrape to verify the address.

Though, id probably just google for some good address regexes, match against pages, for each address just throw them into something like maps.google.com/?q=[address] then try to scrape whatever normally pops up for a valid result. Also helps if you're expecting addresses to be in a certain country.
Wouldn't a TeX engine written in Ecmascript make more sense?

A Web2JS of sorts maybe...

Though I'm more inclined towards using XeTeX since it solves a lot of problems without gluing a whole new language (LuaTex anyone?) in there.
Hmm, does it? It's been months since I implement the spec, but, from what I recall, you hand the signed assertion to the user and they present it to the site. Am I wrong?
Uhh, I'm probably one of those "wealthy" investors, via my 401k retirement savings. I assure you, I'm not in the 1%. Please don't default.

> 40 to 50%

That would be very unusual in most of the US, as the lenders typically want a 28/36 front-end/back-end ratios. Obviously, during the bubble things were a little ... looser.
Cheerio is really easy for anyone familiar with jQuery (most node.js devs I would imagine).
Dat Parallax: From spinning the path or shadow plots, I think

All Glory to the Hypnotoad: Click play, let it run all the way through, or sit in another window for 15+ mintues

I think the rest come from fiddling with js in the console. I've been twisting knobs, like 'fov' and such, but haven't found anything yet.

Frickin brilliant, of course. /hat tip!!!
Beleaguered is the preferred term.
There are no specific plans, currently. It's Python and Django, though.
its probably more organized and easier to read than a huge number of nested callbacks
Yes, that's the textbook for this course.
Lean on God
This looks great, but I'm not so keen on getting into Java at this point. Has anyone taken this, and if so would it be feasible for someone from a Ruby/Python background to grok what they're getting at?
Makes me wonder how many HN readers are in China.
The netbook manufacturers were free to install a full copy of Windows 7 or Ubuntu or anything else they wanted (except Mac OS X, obviously).

They didn't want to install a full copy of Windows 7 because they would have had to pay the full price for it (after the usual discounts etc).

After much argument, they came up with a compromise that had acceptable functionality (to Microsoft) at an acceptable price (to the OEMs).

So Microsoft was helping, rather than "not helping".

But you're right: the aim was to sell netbooks without having too big an impact on more profitable sales of laptops.
The Evolution Of Retail
HAProxy configuration for Meteor projects
The NSA's attacks may have been facilitated by earlier spying on the UN that was carried out by the State Department. I posted the reference in another thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6274158
>>>Imagine prescription eye glasses that turn off myopic correction when you miss a payment

Philip K. Dick already did, from Ubik --

Back in the kitchen he fished in his various pockets for a dime, and, with it, started up the coffeepot. Sniffing the -- to-him -- very unusual smell, he again consulted his watch, saw that fifteen minutes had passed: he therefore vigorously strode to the apt door, turned the knob and pulled on the release bolt.

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I’ll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it. "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I’m right," the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

"I'll sue you," the door said as the first screw fell out.
I agree that it is unobtainable.

I mode one of the top 50 /r/ on reddit, as well as some much much smaller ones. I have multiple accounts - but not in a gaming-the-system sense; I had a primary account and a novelty account... I wound up posting "primary" comments under my novelty account by mistake after leaving myself logged in with that account some time ago... now my novelty is my primary and my primary is dormant.

In the smaller /r/ I mod - I post instructional vids, and google linked them back to my real name. Even though I have an anonymized account for youtube, I also have a real-name account.

Once when posting, for reasons which are obfuscated by google, my uploads went to my real-name account which I posted to reddit...

So... ultimately, its easy to tie all these together as strong-selectors back to me :(

I have an idea on how to deal with tracking which may completely eliminate the ability to track a browser, but the issue is that even with 100% anonymity of an account on a site like reddit, ultimately you will post something that connects that account to your real-ID.
You're not following the impact to the end.

The problem with this is that a person makes an investment with a known risk profile. That needs to be known in order to just the worthiness of the investment: the higher the risk, the higher the return needs to be.

When someone comes in and changes the rules, that messes up everything. Suddenly those safe mortgage investments that you felt were a good investment at a 5% return become absolutely shit because you run the risk of taking a huge loss.

What is the impact? All those people that bought up the mortgages a while back now want another 5% in return to offset the risk of having the mortgages suddenly lose value.

Who loses? Homeowners because now you can only find mortgages at 10%, not 5%.
Perl Code: Using WordPress::API::Post to create Wordpress Blog Posts
Como hacer enchiladas de pollo
> Sorry, when I used "mathematical" in the quoted paragraph I did not mean an actual theorem in mathematics, I meant a scientific theory that involves heavy use of mathematics to describe some aspect of the world.

Yes, that's different, and for that case, my reply was misdirected. A theory in mathematical physics must certainly acquire empirical support, and must remain falsifiable in perpetuity.

> I think the big issue that OP has with economics is that it is neither beautiful, like much of pure mathematics, nor particularly grounded in empirical results, so it essentially winds up being a bunch of complexity for complexity's sake.

I agree completely, and the consequences are sometimes severe, as when quants use questionable economic theories to make phony risk estimates that backfire.

> That's the problem, not just the fact that a theory is complex and difficult to understand.

Yes, both difficult to understand, and difficult to test in any meaningful sense.
It's almost certainly intentionally ambiguous, and therein lies the joke.
True. I left in 2008
Is there a way to put your own custom OS on a Chromecast? The hardware seems great for allowing some third party (maybe via Kickstarter) to build a truly open platform on top of it.
this affected me as well, i had to provision a new database and promote it to master in order to bring my app back online
Strawman recapitulation of PHKs thoughts. Unfortunately, the conclusions are both wrong, and naïve at worst.

Crypto that gets used has to be easy-to-use, MySQL style. I think a project like tcpcrypt is great example, in theory. Simple is good because the pain of setup has to be least. (Tcpcrypt is opportunistic encryption that needs no additional setup and is different from SSL.)

Crypto does work. Snowden admitted as such.

“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.”

http://m.techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/encrypting-your-email-wor...

(The last point is another form of the ancient security problem of taking steps to minimize chances of plaintext disclosure.)

The cost to capture or recover plaintext should be much greater to the proportion of the potential value of the PT over the time it could cause damage.

Just giving up is defeatist and expects that some future government made of fallible people would suddenly get enlightenment and act benignly. Never going to happen, there is too much money and power at stake. (USG fears its citizens but abuses power to crucify dissenters.)

Encrypting almost everything is one immediate way to forcibly remove the possibility of abuse. Remember that even if (and that's a big "if") political sands were shifted one way, they would certainly shift back to a culture of secrecy and expedient Machevellianism. If you don't take reasonable measures to protect yourself, you don't understand what's going on or what works. There are no easy fixes, only defense-in-depth. Security is fundamentally an unending competition of gambits and countermeasures that will continue so long as people have secrets or desire freedom from intrusion.