skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused. The US government spends around $3.8 Trillion and takes in around $3.1 Trillion (2014 estimates). So it seems like it could pay 85% of its bills without borrowing. Wouldn't they be able to pay the less than $200 Billion annual cost of military personnel out of the $3.1 Trillion?
We don't want your coffescript
We are doing it for about a year.
Here is our demo at HackWaw: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXY7EkOJkwY
These tools only work when:

1) You've implemented dependency injection, or

2) You're using a container

For example, in PHP you can't mock something like "$foo = new Bar();". The code is right there, it's saying exactly what it wants, you can't return a fake class (unless you do some ugly magic).

However, you can pass in an object that is_a Bar, either injecting it via DI or storing it and then retrieving it from a container.

With code like Foo::Bar() - that's it. You're tied to the Foo class, Bar() method and you can't change a thing about this.
What do you mean that's what the commit history is for? That's what a DAG is; that's what I'm talking about. You know what the DAG is, right? I don't want to exclude all merge commits when looking at the DAG. I merely don't want to see all of your "merged master into master" bubbles because you can't be bothered to clean up a bit and rebase before pushing your changes.

I don't know what you're going on about with this "destroying history" as if the sequence of your little typo mistakes are some kind of precious documentary that needs to be preserved in case some forensic expert wants to trace every step you made along the process of adding a widget. You might as well go find a system that records and tracks every key you type, because after all, every time you hit the backspace key, you are destroying history.

Tags do not keep alternate histories. They are simply labels on commits. You use them to mark certain commits as releases, you do not use them to track every logical change to the codebase. They are used sparingly to track the occasional version number bump as a result of a sufficiently large number of changes. These version tags do not provide the granularity I need when I look to see what is happening on a single branch at any point in time. To add them to every non-trivial commit as a way of distinguishing them from the just-dicking-around commits would be ludicrous.

edit: One more thing. I think it is absolutely silly to say in one comment "stop committing non-workable intermediate stuff and finish what you're doing before committing" and then turn around in another comment and talk about how rebase has a "nasty side-effect of destroying history". You do realize that all the editing and polishing you're doing before you make your commit is the same type of destroying history that would happen if you made small, incremental commits and then cleaned them up with rebase, right? The only difference is that your way is way more dangerous as far as losing history is concerned, and you're not taking advantage of any of the benefits of Git in the process.
You have good insight here, but it's hard to follow.
Serious question: Why is this story from 2009 being posted now? I feel like I missed something.
I really like Lawrence Lessig's proposal. It is a "hack" of the Citizen's United ruling along the lines of how copyleft is a hack of copyright law.

In essence, he proposes that all campaign donations go into a "black box" and are secretly reversible. So you can write a check to your politician's PAC, hand it directly to him but he must deposit the funds into the black box. Then you can secretly get some or all of your money back - the politician can't tell who reneged on their donation.

Lessig's approach does not in any way restrict how much you can give to a politician - there is no "censorship" in mandating that political donations go into a black box - the campaign can still see that you made the donation - they still "hear" your speech. Nor are you forced to keep it a secret if you reneg, you are free to tell the politician you took back your money if you really want him to know that.

Reportedly something like the above was tried on a small scale, an election for Miami or south Florida, judges. Apparently the result was that all of the campaigns netted exactly zero dollars in donations when all was said and done.
Is that an Xfce panel on the top, in the image? Looks like Steam on Xubuntu.
2013 Halloween Light Show
Typed Clojure's type system is too rich to avoid top-level annotations. It's a similar situation to Scala.
Friends Don't Let Friends Play Cookie Clicker
I've got 164 comments on HN over nearly three months now, and the one I'm replying to is responsible for fifteen percent of my accumulated karma.

o_O

Apparently people feel pretty strongly about slavedriver bosses! I guess I shouldn't be surprised...
Sure it can. Linux can be compiled for ARM.
This is the backstory
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/whats-at-stake-in-mccutche...

The U.S. Supreme Court is going to hear a campaign finance case that could do away with the contribution limits that limit rich people’s influence over politics.Currently, federal law only lets individuals give $2,600 to any one candidate during a single election.

On top of that limit, people can only give $123,000 to candidates, political action committees, and parties over a two-year period.

<continues>
Modern SCIFs vibrate window panes to prevent laser microphones.

They also use EMF shielding to prevent TEMPEST attacks. Most interesting to me is that they were aware of TEMPEST leakage as early as WWII.
Hope they remember to keep the ink ribbon. Old school attacks.
Google testing new homepage design, removes black bar.
I already start arguing along these lines now - starting with the refusal to define even semi-stable interfaces across versions of a library.

Instead of relying on actual reusable building blocks, you're expected to build specific versions of ruby interpreter and libraries for every project.

Imagine having to cope with just ever so slightly different (but certainly incompatible) philips screws whenever you want to affix one physical thing to another.
Definitely agree with the premise of you comments though. The Indian govt. has been grossly negligent in the past. But with the size, bureaucracy, corruption and red-tape involved, it is incredibly hard for any generally-sane citizen to bring about change. Hopefully, thing will get better in the future. The next to-be-elected prime minister is a bit of hard nut and is expected to bring about change for the good.
Great concept, great execution. A lovely parody! Definitely earned my clickthrough.

Here are the details of the law they are pushing for: http://anticorruptionact.org/

I'm very happy to know that campaign finance is getting this sort of attention. I've always been incredulous that in our system, bribery isn't just legal, it's literally mandatory -- you can't get elected if you're too clean to accept shady campaign contributions.

I love the $100 tax-rebate-for-campaign-contributions idea. I have long thought that we needed to publicly fund campaigns but despaired at the power of entrenched interests: existing campaign finance reform laws came with loopholes that ultimately revealed them as PR stunts rather than legitimate efforts to curb bribery. The tax rebate is exciting because it sneaks a backdoor into what would appear to be another bogus reform law.

"Naming and shaming" lobbyists, muzzling the latest contribution-funneling-device-du-jour, and calling for more regular rule enforcement aren't strategies that strike me as particularly promising, since they simply call for more of what we're already doing (if x gets us nothing, no reason to expect 2x will get us more). But they serve as the perfect vehicle to deliver #7, the tax rebate, which silently activates once public interest reaches a certain threshold (enough to outspend current election financiers) and gives the bill teeth. A brilliant design!

I really hope this works. I doubt it will, but I really, really want to be wrong.
No matter someone's stance on this, it seems a bit forward to discredit a relatively widely-held theory as something that is weakly argued by providing a few bullet points and then an outright assertion of another competing theory. This kind of thing has no place on Hacker News.
Speaking as someone who works on a 2 million user enterprise app with standard PHP, i would have to counter that: 1) the footguns are easy to sidestep once you know them and are gradually getting removed, 2) standard php has traits and strict typing, but the typing is not for primitive types (which is what Hack adds) and 3) in nearly a decade i have had a single feature where i could have really used a faster php, whereas in practice my performance issues all come from the Oracle bottleneck because php is so easy to parallellize. Facebook could run on standard php, it would just require more hardware, and since releasing hhvm php has gotten a lot faster without breaking backwards compatibility.
This is the type of clever advertisement that won't change the opinion of anyone, because its target audience is already on its side.

(Also, and I'm saying this as a nerdy Democrat, calling out the lobbying efforts of Bloomberg, Koch, et al is easier but significantly less educational than, say, the lobbying efforts of Google and Amazon.)
12 presumptions for the Breaking Bad finale
The 386 has an MMU, making it feasible to do preemptive multitasking and virtual memory.

The 286 and 8086 had multitasking based on allowing small programs to run concurrently, but nothing that used a lot of memory.

The competing 68000 also lacked an MMU. The later 68010, I think, had the MMU.
This library is arguably the most used library on CococaPods, and has been serious refresher for me in terms of what a network API should look like. It was during a discussion about what AFNetworking did that kickstarted CocoaDocs so that everyone has easy access to documentation for any Obj-C library.

To bring it back to CocoaPods, Mattt's push towards making sure that CocoaPods works well with AFNetworking and vice-versa has had a huge benefit on the community in terms of both showing what the new standard for OSS on Obj-C should look like and what the best practices for writing apps should be. And I applaud him for this.

I think AFNetworking is the library that has most raised the sea level that we all now work at. Thank you Mattt. If I didn't already owe you a beer, I do so doubly now.
> The fact is, most people aren't qualified to interpret the data.

so what if most people isn't qualified? Data is data, and can be used - even for crackpots who wants to use it. If these crackpots publishes something wrong, i m sure they'd be pointed out and either ignored or shunned by the publisher(s) anyway.
Linus also had the internet. Look at rms' signature - UUCP, ARPAnet. The internet, usenet and the patch program made collaboration much easier.
I'm preferentially a Python programmer who is currently working on a large well-known high-Alexa-ranked website that uses the LAMP stack. The site has been around for a while and is a behemoth, so I understand why it has stayed with these technologies despite the fact that there are many people on the project at this point who'd prefer otherwise. There are both ugly workarounds and rambling boilerplate in several places due to limitations in both PHP and MySQL, and there are also other ugly portions of the codebase due to inexperienced developers or bad legacy decisions that haven't been fully refactored (not the fault of PHP or MySQL). However, there is also a good deal of work that is well thought out and architected so I no longer have as many qualms about PHP as I used to (that I now realize was due to being thrown into codebases that were just a mishmash of crap... there do seem to be more of those in PHP than in other languages, but that's just my personal exposure).

All the same, if you're not inheriting a legacy codebase, I don't think there is any reason to use a LAMP stack on a greenfield project that you will be creating tomorrow. There are just too many better alternatives out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archipelagic_state
A codec is software. Software is mathematical formulae in code form. Math, and therefore software, should never be patentable.
Why iOS 7 is making some users sick
Release a large number of cats to catch and eat the birds. Solved once and for all. ONCE AND FOR ALL.
the fact is, as a non-tax paying non-american you don't have the privilege to access it, but for the "generosity" of the US Gov't (and the fact that enforcing copyright for these things is both costly and not worthwhile).
The blog date was 9/14, and the groundwork was done presumably at least 2 weeks before (seeing the title of the post). Twilio announced MMS on 9/18 at TwilioCon.

According to their website, you can get MMS via regular phone #s.

Send and receive pictures over both phone numbers and short codes with Twilio Picture Messaging.

However, this service was recently launched
The second tag line is kinda long. "Mail pics with just a text" might be better.
For a long time, I assumed that lobbyists pressured legislators to take certain positions in exchange for money or other forms of influence.

After watching a few documentaries about campaign finance reform, I realized this is only partially true. In reality, it's just as common for legislators to solicit money from lobbyists.

In one case I heard of a policymaker leaving a voicemail for a corporate lobbyist that went something along the lines of, "I hear you represent [x liquor company]. I sit on a committee charged with reviewing alcohol-related ads. I was just wondering why I haven't received any contributions from you."
> no problem with professional scientists who selfishly want to get paid for their work.

nor do i, but if their only method of getting paid is to restrict others from using raw data till they've made their break through "discovery", then they are not worth what they are paid!
For anyone that has worked for a large organization, for- or non-profit, for any amount of time with a budget then it's easier to understand how things actually work.

I have seen 9 figure / 7 year internal projects silently scuttled as to not create a "failure", despite delivering nothing. I have seen 6 figure projects surpass 8 figure projects through a combination of talent and leadership. I've seen duplication of systems merely because two depts can't find a way to work together, effectively doubling costs.

Depends on the meaning of "success." "Success" of a political project is rarely based on results; all projects are "successful," because the unsuccessful ones disappear. Real success, as in achieving an novel aim, is another matter.

Success is great, but at too high of a cost, it may make the results bitter (bodies in the Great Wall, pushing $10 billion total spent on NIF without results). This is where private R&D excels: there's a defined goal, time/cost pressures and usually fewer political constraints. This is why high beta has a higher probability of success AND a lower cost of success (better value/$).
I don't know. In a large AngularJS application I want the Angular module system separated from other JS modules. They are completely different things if you ask me.
It's still profitable after taxes and whatnot. It actually takes advantage of how Bitcoin is converted into cash ;-).
A couple of you have mentioned the traceability of typewriters as a downside. In fact that is a primary reason for using them. Like a gun, every typewriter has unique quirks that can be used to uniquely identify content typed on that machine. In the event of a leak, the Russians (for example) hope to use this forensic info to identify the leaker. The general knowledge of this acts as a deterrent.

Moreover, it's a common strategy to step back a few levels of tech innovation to defeat an opponent. Bayonets. Cops on bike patrols. Hipster bike messengers. Insurgents originally used cell phones to detonate IEDs (Iraq or Afghanistan), but then they had their phones jammed by the USM--so they switched to string. Al-Qaeda uses hand written notes, hand-delivered.

FOIA laws and e-discovery also cause people to go low tech. To get around FOIA requests government officials have simply stopped using email (others used webmail under a false name). And in my last start up, serious issues raised on email elicited a response by phone in part to avoid potential e-discovery in a lawsuit. That kind of shady behavior caused me to leave.
As someone else mentioned, the HURD was started before Linux existed back when micro-kernels was all the rage in academia.

Stallman said that by using the mach-kernel they hoped to get finished faster, as it turned out this was a big mistake which he acknowledged as his own and as soon as Linux took off they started focusing on improving the GNU toolchain in conjunction with Linux.

The Hurd is still in development today because there are people who like working on it during their spare-time, just like all the other alternative kernel/os projects out there.
Privacy, or security, or both?

Nations can rarely afford to have mutually exclusive streams of work. You don't see the U.S waiting till they solve their economic crisis to figure out what to do in Syria.

One of the major problems with the rank generalizations in both domestic and international media about India is that it reduces the problem to a simple combination of inept leadership, useless bureaucracy and abject poverty.

The fact, though, is that there also a lot of good people doing good work at levels (government, leadership etc.), but there is also a large number of people who are doing crappy jobs.

And as far as something like poverty goes, the causes, extent and solution for it differ from region to region. The concept of India is one of the greatest abstractions the world has ever seen. Take away the tricolour, cricket and the movie industry and you'll find people who rarely have much to identify with each other at a national level.

Consequently, any solution will take time and it will be chaotic; at least until a better genuinely progressive leader emerges, which looks unlikely for a long time to come. Waiting for all that to fall in place till measures are taken to ensure data security and privacy may well mean those won't happen in my lifetime.

p.s: The state of IT in the government is terrible in India. Any smart citizen have to live under the assumption that everything is compromised, by the state itself and by other states.
Oregon has a 50 dollar (or $100 for married filers) tax credit for direct campaign contributions to political candidates or certain classes of organizations (I tend to just donate to a candidate though, for confidence/simplicity.)

It's definitely incentivized me to redirect this portion of my Oregon taxes to a candidate (on local/state/national level) I support.

EDIT: link with info.

http://www.oregonfamilycouncil.org/sites/default/files/under...
How is it a widely-held theory? It hasn't stood up to scrutiny, at least any well documented tests.

It is sorta misleading, in fact, because a lot of good authors and speakers assume it as a well known fact and add their leaps of imagination to it. It is OK at best as a pop culture thing, maybe a poetic spin off.

Why does it have no place on Hacker ... oh, you know what, scratch that. No point entering that debate. Thanks.
I'm not a CS lover, but I think most of your arguments are invalid. You say that you don't like CoffeeScript because it generates JavaScript code you don't understand. But do you understand what machine code will JS generate? No? Why? Maybe because you don't care... In general same thing applies here. If you need to debug generated JS, use source maps. This argument is not an excuse. Beside, CS is fairly simple in translating to/from JS. If you think it's not, try use dart2js ;)
If someone answers this in the positive (which I doubt), I'd like to tack on the further question "what was so amazing about this software that made you start using it long enough ago, while it was so far in its very slow to come to fruition infancy, that by the time the software reached 0.5 you already had a large scale deployment" ;P.
Strange Loop 2013, Fast and Dynamic
Ok, you all misunderstood what I was trying to say, which means I said it badly.

What I was hinting at is that though the mouse is currently the best form of input for a lot of games (ANSI the reason why I don't have a console, I don't like gaming without a mouse), does that mean we should stop trying to find other forms of input device?

I didn't mean the age statement negatively, just to point out we've had this tech for a while, so maybe it's time to look for other ways to go, instead of 'building a faster horse'.

In 2060 who knows what will be the top form of input for gaming. It might be this controller, it could still be the mouse or it may be something we haven't even dreamt of yet.
The power consumption difference between 1GB and 2GB is far from negligible, both in auto-refresh (active) and self-refresh (sleep) mode.

It's a significant fraction of total power draw when asleep. You also have to account for PMU efficiency being pretty low when running at low current, so minor changes are an even larger difference. There's plenty of publicly available figures you can find to research this - find the "IDD6" self-refresh current in an lpDDR datasheet. Scale to the size of DDR you want, compare with battery rating adjusted for voltage.
my neighbor's step-aunt makes $73 hourly on the laptop. She has been out of work for 9 months but last month her payment was $13411 just working on the laptop for a few hours. i was reading this.............http://redir.ec/buzz55
Cool those tapes will be really easy to read.
WRITE Your CSS WITH JAVASCRIPT – KRASIMIR TSONEV
my Aunty Paige just got an awesome yellow Nissan Rogue SUV by working part time from a home computer... find more information................http://redir.ec/buzz55
Or even an electronic device capable of digitizing a sheet of paper and sending it over some communication system such as a phone line. It would make facsimiles of the original... I guess we could call it a facs machine for short?
http://redir.ec/buzz55
my Aunty Paige just got an awesome yellow Nissan Rogue SUV by working part time from a home computer... find more information ...................http://redir.ec/buzz55
> "text a law"

While trying to be a parody, the page basically describes ALEC.
Coffeescript is a tool rather than a language. The syntactic conventions of this tool form a sort of "shorthand" for "best practice" javascript which happens to be also almost as easy to comprehend as javascript itself, amounting to a net productivity gain.

Given that, coffeescript is nothing beyond javascript. It does not have its own ecosystem, its own libraries, its own type system or any of the other baggage that comes with some other compile-to-javascript systems.
CloudDS — How to build an Amazon S3 clone
Are there people that seriously can't just read CoffeeScript as-is? Are there seriously people that can't scan through the CoffeeScript docs in about 20 minutes and pick up the language more or less?

The first time I saw CoffeeScript I immediately realized, oh, fuck yes, this is obviously better, and switched over to it immediately. I was productive with it instantly. Is it really something worth spending your time arguing about in either direction? I mean, it feels like telling someone to quit using their English accent or slang when you only understand American. Reading CoffeeScript code is hardly an effort in trying to decipher a compiler, almost all of CS's constructs do exactly what you expect if you'd have to guess, and where they are not obvious the non-obvious is due to Javascript's oddities, not anything to do with CS.

A better analogy for CoffeeScript is not another language, but it's Javascript slang or shorthand. It's a practitioners dialect of the language.
Apparently in Sweden, political donations to the parties are unlimited and anonymous. That must be why Sweden is well-known the world over as a brutal hypercapitalist kleptocratic dystopia. Right?