skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fact that homeschooling is referred to as indoctrination when compared with public schooling sickens me. I can't really think of many more poorly designed systems than (1) a popularly elected government, who (2) controls what its future voters are taught.

As engineers, this should be an easy point to take hold of. How is the publicly elected government planning curriculum somehow less indoctrination than a parent doing the same?
"Mistake". It was likely just testing the waters.
The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em
Sorry, I take my policy queues from Abbott and Turnbull. I haven't really thought it that far through. But if you vote for me I can probably muddle through.
Now, if software was that modular... Sigh...
Hearsay Social Raises Another $30M
> release cycle of the App Store encourages the perfectionist in all of us to make it “done”

Isn't that exactly the reason for Apple's policies?
It has 3d bevels, if you look closely. That makes it look a bit dated, although just being flat to be trendy wouldn't be good either.
Exploring Elasticsearch
Perhaps at the grand old age of 32, I am becoming bitter and jaded but after SOPA and ACTA was blocked, they are just going to come around and try again and again and again. This is exactly what has happened in Australia with this damn internet filter.

I remember what it was like to dial into BBS's when I was in high school. The freedoms we had online then were incredible compared to what we have today.

The fight we are fighting is not one to win new territory or new freedoms - its one to protect what we already have. Sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. But we have to win all the time just to keep things where they are today. All it takes is one loss and something is irrevocably gone...
Effective Java and Effective C++ have a good format for listing best practices, and nowadays more and more languages seem to adopt their own "Effective" book or web page... I like how useful they are to see real-world problems before you decide picking up a language.
How much entropy in that password? (2011)
I can’t help but think that whatever gets released will be utterly worthless. We’ll have to wait and see, but if government agencies don’t want to let the public in on what they’re doing, they usually find a way.
F.T.C. Says Webcam’s Flaw Put Users’ Lives on Display
that runtime is larger than firefox update. why not make a proper user agent?
As a word of warning, Scala.js is very new project (started I think only 7 months ago) and thus it's very immature.
Traditional (i.e. Paul Rand era) logo design was trying to distill a company down to a minimal essence. Having bevels leaves in a decorative element that makes in non-minimal. That it should look good in 1 color is fundamental to traditional logo design.

Yes, but it is going to be used on the screen 99% of the time, you say. But people who violate that rule end up with logos that are just a little bit tacky to a graphic designer.
Owww, actually looking at the map I would suggest Taiwan!
This is really where unit tests will save your hide. I never did any truly dramatic rewrite, but there was one project (fairly new, even) that had one very badly written, very badly understood module.

I started out writing unit tests for it. There weren't any, so I wrote them until I had unit tests that tested everything. Those unit tests also document the behaviour of the module. So then I started asking people what it was really supposed to do. Then I refactored it into something more maintainable. Only after that did I change the unit tests to reflect the behaviour the module was supposed to have, and based on that I finally wrote the code we needed.

The unit tests were my anchor in the storm. They keep me grounded. They mean I can do anything to the code, while keeping tabs on the impact my changes have.
Great news!

Let's put it in context. In a nation of over 300,000,000 people, in which we know several departments of the executive branch are spending billions to spy on the world in gross violation of the Constitution, it seems only one or two people (Snowden and Manning with help from the press), and one or two organizations (EFF and ACLU), are able to make any meaningful progress.

The legislative branch has done almost nothing and is largely complicit. The judicial branch has been largely complicit except when motivated by the EFF and ACLU and didn't help with Manning. Same with the press. What's left? What other successes can we build on? What historical models can we learn from?

Probably everyone reading this wants to help. Surely we can come up with some way to do something. We can contribute resources to the EFF and ACLU. Frankly, I don't see marching in the streets helpful, but I'd love to be proved wrong. What else?

WE'RE TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURS! We claim to understand the issues and know how to create and lead teams and marshal resources to meet demand. If any progress is to happen, IT HAS TO START HERE WITH US.

What else can we -- you and I -- do?

- Can we motivate and support more whistleblowers so future ones don't have to fear jail and persecution?

- Can we contribute more time, money, and other resources to the EFF and ACLU?

- Can we create new organizations to augment their work?

I have to believe we have more ideas in us. What else can we do? Can YOU add to this list?
I wouldn't mind it if I had to have my phone to access the identity. It would be a simple matter of integration to use the phone to grant a temporary authorization to an unknown device.
I see your point.

PayPal is a business partner in this setup, and they are shouldering a lot of risk on the developers behalf. I can understand not wanting to share something as intimate as a business/developement plan, but PayPal is within their rights, boty legally and morally, to ask for one. If the developers are having trouble with this, they should find another partner for their venture. (imho)

That said, PayPal can be real douchebags. Too many friends, business partners and colleagues has been burnt by them in the past. If you're doing something nonprofit, move elsewhere.
It does when you brake.
Creating The Non-Scalable System – of Housing, FlipKart, Freecharge and More
Event Sourcing in Clojure
I went to a private school in Alabama. Other students of the public schools in Alabama near me were clearly less well-educated than most of my classmates (I was the valedictorian, and my point is that those in the 85th percentile of our graduating class all basically trounced the public school upper-tier locally - not just me).

Part of my problem with public schools stems from that experience - I knew valedictorians from a few graduating classes near mine in the public schools closest to me, and they just weren't as well-educated. It's possible that I had an abnormal experience, but I doubt it - my father graduated from one of those same public schools, and he's extremely intelligent (mechanical engineer, owns a robotics engineering company). Even still, he chose to send us to a private school because he didn't expect us to get as good of an education in the public system.

Of note: the private school I went to paid significantly less to its teachers than did the public schools around. I'm very aware of this because my brother is a teacher. He had to make a conscious decision to forego higher pay for his ideals, because he too felt that the public school system just doesn't have as much to offer.

My point is, microscopes and money are not the problem I have with the public schools.
I am using Scala.js for a week now, and I am surprised by how mature it already is. Optimized Scala.js is less than a megabyte, and therefore actually usable. Obviously there are caveats, for example Character.isLetter is not implemented; but the entire collection library of Scala is available.
The big question is when he's going to take that trip. They're supposed to have the cross country capacity only at the end of the year. Why announce it now and wait 4 months to actually do it?
Paxos made simple (2001) [pdf]
> Rather than get used to using H J K L, I spent that evening waiting for a new vi executable to build in my home directory.
>Laziness will find a way.

Doesn't sound like laziness as much as it sounds like the thinking of an obstinate youngster who secretly is uneasy with learning new things.
My issue with politics in general is the lack of sacrifice for the amount of power one gains.
Lets take the President as an example, what does a presidential candidate sacrifice upon choosing (of own free will) to run? Aside from 4-8 years of no personal life there really is nothing important.

Becoming a politician and essentially gaining power over people is a free choice, why do we not expect them to make sacrifices?
Here in Norway there is currently an ongoing discussion regarding politicians taking jobs at lobbying-firms and PR-firms. Some advocating higher "quarantines", some advocating a life-long ban.
Personally, I'll not be voting on for instance a political party (we have 3 major parties and 4 lesser) whose Minister of Trade&Industry is a major player in offshore salmon-farms. (S)he might be a good minister, but with regards to corruption you are as secure as you would be in the olden days of passing power from Regent to Prince.
Surprised nobody came up with a
Yahಠ_ಠ!

This one seemed classy enough and modern ...http://media.tumblr.com/bd2439f8e2fc7a08ce923374af8f3758/tum...
I've seen PayPal nearly put several small businesses out of business.

There are some things that cause PayPal to just freeze an account, and it's next to impossible to speak to a human or to otherwise get the situation resolved.

Pretty much the only threat to Stripe's eventual world domination would be PayPal getting its act together.
Creativity starts from a belief
That's Shitpal for you
Australian Coalition retracts Internet filters policy
Flat may be "in", but that doesn't mean literally every single thing has to be flat, or that it's the best idea for Yahoo.
Laws don't live in a vacuum. They are enforced with the threat or carrying-out of violence by those with a monopoly on force.

Suggesting that someone's children be taken from them is absolutely the threat of showing up at their doorstep with guns. Do you think people just say "no, it's no big deal, take my kids that I love."? Not a chance.

I'm not sure if you're being a dick or if you haven't thought this through (or both).
so are we supposed to gear up for the opportunity to possibly help a game get funded so we can play it in a year or so...this is worse than those gamestop reservations that have the game set for 12/31 - just teases the consumer
0 A.D.: IndieGoGo Crowdfunding Campaign, New Release
People can get tired of other people telling this, but really, they should use Bitcoin. There are several advantages of this: accountability (you can verify with the block chain that they really received your payment), ease of use (utilizing 3rd parties like Coinbase, BitPay and others you don't really have to know how Bitcoin works to pay with them) and most importantly - irreversibility - once you receive Bitcoin there are no chargebacks.

PS. They accept Bitcoin donations (not in the indiegogo campaign, just independently) and already raised 52.44 BTC which roughly translates to 5244 EUR. Not bad if you ask me for a payment channel that's not actively advertised by them.
This is the best open source game I've played. Even though it's unfinished and tries to fry my gpu.
I guess it is, I was just curious to see if Path users would even mind
FUD. Every project that's not yet done is a crystal ball of promises until its delivered. IGG and KS have good records so far. And these guys that put their names on this project are highly motivated to deliver.
Large botnet cause of recent Tor network overload
It seems to go back up to three days. This is great to catch up HN after fishing week-end!
I wasn't clear to me from the article alone how GNU Stow decides where to put the files. Looking it up in the manfile stow uses the parent directory of the "stow directory" by default.

You can change this behaviour using the --target and --dir options, where setting --dir will set the target dir to the parent of what you set for --dir.

I don't think it's possible to configure a target in the package itself, as far as I can see from reading the man page.
Handing seats over to the greens and independents is pretty much why we had a minority government though. The system works on a seat by seat basis, but it doesn't seem to work when forming a government.

Though this election is going to be a landslide for the Libs, and split votes aren't going to have much impact.
Batman.js 0.15 finally released, Meet your new favorite JavaScript superhero
So, you're saying that all of those in our government responsible for determining what requirements are needed for public education are wrong, and that the decades and decades of experience they have in determining what should be required mean nothing? Loads of teachers dedicate themselves to educating themselves as teachers and taking on student loans for no reason and then never say anything about it? It's all just a big lie?
It's not strictly NodeJS based - According to their site it runs on top of Lua...

There's also another JavaScript microcontroller crowdfunding at the moment:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/48651611/espruino-javasc...
I never knew about "best" or "lists". Awesome. Thanks.
Again, this was just _one_ example of the top off my head. I could probably have come up with lots of others. My point being that we don't know how what we post today might be used in the future. Saying that it's not going to have consequences because everyone else will also do it is a very weak argument.
I support your position. This is like a bad investor trying to type on your keyboard and criticize your bikeshed's color. Paypal needs to MTOB.
I was fortunate to be working in the centre of Newcastle around 2007 when the last of the Valenta-engined 125s were in service, and I'd hear the north-bound trains pulling out of the station. But since then they've changed to newer diesel engines, and they don't have that glorious screaming turbocharger anymore.

Here's what it sounded like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H-WKRIXynQ
So we keep reading this kind of thing on Paypal. Are there any viable alternatives for consumers? As a company you could use Stripe or Paymill (for Europe), but as a consumer the only alternative is to pull out a credit card when I buy games on Steam. I don't want to do this, I want a login for a payment provider that is coupled to my bank account. I don't want to walk around with my credit card as it is too unsafe (something that Americans probably don't understand).
JS TDD session: State vs. History
Actually, it's hard for a 9-character password to beat a 12-character password even though the latter has a larger alphabet/key-space (unless I've completely blown the analysis below, which was done before coffee :).

The first has a key-space of 36^12 (36 possible characters in each of 12 positions), or about 4.7e18. The second has a key-space of 62^9 (62 upper/lower case letters and digits in each of 9 possible locations), or about 1.4e16.

If, in addition to adding the uppercase letters, you added the possibility of needing to test symbols, such as ~`.,/:;!@#$%^&*-=_+ (another 19 symbols), and changed the latter password to "tlpW#NT2m", then the searchable key-space for all 9-character passwords becomes 81^9, or about 1.5e17.

RE-EDIT: Sorry. I should have read the article first. I'm not sure why the latter would be more secure. Obviously "WENT" would be in a dictionary, so I'd think that "tlpWENT2m" would fall to a combinator attack very quickly, too.
It looks like it should be on a bottle of perfume.
Be careful, this is how devs expose private ssh keys.
I voted for them last time, and I'm voting for them again. Be aware that voting for the sex party is almost a donkey vote in all but Victoria though. Make sure you vote below the line.
Are we all writing small jQuery scripts right into the HTML in a script tag? This post suggests that practice. I can see it being the faster option for just a 1-3 line script, what's the tipping point when we move it to an independent (minified) .js file? Is that just a readability issue? And why do I need all of jQuery to add/remove a class from one element?

It seems there's a conflict here: Either there's little JS and no need for jQuery, or a lot of JS and no sense in dropping it in the HTML.
How to start and test a company for $0
> but PayPal is within their rights, boty legally and morally

No and no. They're a payment provider, a utility, not a partner. They could have stated up front that they want a business plan or could have denied acting as payment provider. They could have demanded the backers to waive their refund rights. I'd even be on their side if they kept a percentage of the funds as security.

The backers have a moral right to see a business plan, if any person at all has one. It's their money and they did not give it to paypal so that paypal can collect interest on it, they gave it to mailpile and they collectively are shouldering a much bigger risk than paypal in that transaction.
maybe it is news because it is Stanford, but half the commenters act like this is something new to academia. It certainly is not. For instance, Boston University has long joined in Series A and Series B rounds[1]. This is despite the caution you might expect a university who poured $85 million into a faculty startup might show[2].

[1] http://www.bu.edu/otd/vc/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Silber#Endowment_controve...
Moot Manifesto – The current state of online discussion must change
That's funny, because Amazon Payments is exactly what crowdfunding site Kickstarter uses[0] to pay out to projects.

[0]: http://www.kickstarter.com/help/amazon
RCS is a lot less complexity and remembering commands than a full-on VCS for a few stray config files.
What intellectual property do you think are in the pieces that are closed, in the Google apps and apis for android?

There's certainly a lot of work put into making the stuff work -- but opening up the code won't make it stop working for Google. And I really doubt there's much fancy in there - mostly just grunt work to implement some straightforward ideas. I fail to see how opening that up under something like the GPL or AGPL, preventing someone to (legally) take the code and "run away" with it -- will lower the value of the Android system.
Part of the reason we open-sourced Selfstarter was to prevent situations like this happening to other companies. With Selfstarter and by extension Crowdtilt's Crowdhoster [1] if you have a problem like this, it would merely be a setback rather than a crisis.

You manage your relationship with your customers, not someone else. If your payment processor gives you trouble, have your customers re-auth with a friendlier provider like Stripe, WePay or Amazon. If nothing else, even having the option to do so gives you more leverage should you find yourself in this position.

If you need further convincing about the benefits of self-hosting your crowdfunding campaign, please see this earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6261442

[1] http://www.crowdhoster.com/
Croatia is a thought. Some Croatian friends mentioned property values are skyrocketing because of pervasive construction. Split is nice too.
Two things people need to keep in mind when using PayPal.

1) The company functions as an uninsured bank while essentially skipping the label thereby giving itself a legal loophole to function as it pleases. However, unlike a bank, you can't get to an actual human being in a timely manner unless you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. You're simply not important enough and PayPal is big enough that none of your complaints will really make a dent.

2) PayPal puts a value on risk. Your perception of this risk may be markedly different from PayPal's, however it is still there and if you trip over that threshold, you will be shut down with extreme prejudice. Projects like Mailpile function in a different world than even digital goods of a few years ago. You're not really donating for a product, but the expectation of a service which will, hopefully, come to fruition. The risk threshold set by PayPal is still under the older digital goods model which is an ill fit for Mailpile to begin with.

Those two aren't the only reasons why no one should use PayPal, but keep in mind that nothing you do, show or even consider reasonable matters to them as it's their assessment that ultimately holds sway. You're dealing with a banking megalith with an equivalent responsiveness.

Do not use PayPal.
The patent troll crisis is really a software patent crisis
John Howard actually went to an election over the GST. He lied about it the first time, but it's not as though he then passed it into law without warning.
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System [PDF, 1989]
He can go in 6 days and come back in more days, taking his time then...
WE NEED TO CONTROL THE SPENDING!!!!!!!!!

That's basically all it comes down to. Not enough people care about what a fast network can do for the country, and they've been brainwashed to think that the economic management of the last few years has been appalling.

It's really really strange. People all of a sudden seem to give a shit about how much we are spending and think it's a bad thing, when every economic commenter has said it's been managed brilliantly. It looks like a lot of people are trying to be smart and are failing hugely.
Buy onions at Rs 9 per kg online from Groupon
Parallella 'supercomputers' headed to early backers
Making it a bit of a showcase of US sights could broaden the appeal of the crossing, furthering business aims plus motivating people to see their country.
Just make sure you vote below the line and then you can feel comfortable with your vote going to who you want it to go to.
The current animated, 3d logo on the frontpage reminds me of BonziBuddy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy
Why would congress want to do that? They approved all this and they don't seem interested at all in stopping it.
Some context: Onions prices right now are in a state of inflationary flux in India and this seems to be a new way to tackle the problem.

EDIT: Noted that the seller was Groupon.
Any thought?
Isn't it a bit too expensive? I think it is, especially when considering the competition (Arduino).
In the UK: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
It was suggested to me that the original policy statement was probably a sop for evangelical fundies, who are amongst other things absolutely obsessed with the wickedness and deviltry of teh intarwebs.

I don't really know why they went back on it so precipitously. Maybe Malcolm's mates made a phone call and explained that it was a fucking stupid idea to install the exact mechanism that future governments could 1. turn into a compulsory scheme and 2. use to filter material other than pornography.

I would be interested to know if this was released without Turnbull's approval. It's a sorry story if it was.
Because everyone wants to limit their crowd-funding project to a micro-niche of internet users competent enough to use this internet currency.

Bitcoin has a long way to go before it's as easy to use as Paypal.
Good driving is not about reaction time, it's about anticipation. That's why traffic lights have an amber stage.
I believe you, but I don't know how anyone could miss the "best" page. It's one of only six links across the top banner of the HN site. Often it's more fun to peruse "new", though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newest