skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anti-consumer? I don't think so. The plan was to allow you to use your games wherever you want without the need to bring the physical disc. I don't know why you MS bashers have such a strong need for discs. Disc technology is dead, Microsoft was just leading the new technology that people perhaps aren't ready for. Sony doesn't have nearly the online capacity of Microsoft, not even close - which is why they had to make a more powerful console. In the end, it's not going to matter wether the PS4 is slightly faster. Multi platform games never looked better on PS3, and I don't have to worry about exclusives it seems, since Microsoft has the better line-up at this point. MS has also stated formally that the console won't be used for ad targeting - you can also unplug it if you want.
There is a difference between saying "chairs wouldn't exist without Microsoft" and "Microsoft had a hand in making possible the chair you currently sit in". To be clear, I'm making the second argument - that there is a disproportionate amount of vitriol directed at Microsoft (and even in this thread) given the role that it has played in enabling human advancement.

Microsoft: making chairs cheaper for 30 years. =]
I think the revocation misses the point: "if" the NSA has been logging all the traffic from Lavabit for the last 6 months, they can now use the SSL key to decrypt all the data they've stored. It's not just about future communications, but about decrypting the past.
I have a Oculus Rift, it is not even remotely comparable to the VR headsets of the 90s. The VR headsets of yesteryear were incredibly heavy, had extremely poor resolution, and either did not sense head motion or at all, or were so laggy at it that it induced severe motion sickness.

The Oculus Rift has solved all of this except the resolution bit, and word has it they've got it figured for the retail launch of their product.

The Oculus Rift is to 90s VR as the Ford Model T is to a donkey.
I know because I was watching for the RFP to come out so my company could bid on it. Also it's been reported at various media outlets. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/some-say-h...
"I had some exposure to Lisp in school way back when, and had to do some work in Scheme. I hated it. Strong dislike! So what was I missing? It seems these have a strong following compared with how widespread they are."

I can say that Lisp made my current project possible, given the timeframe we had and the requirements. Here are a few things that make Lisp fantastic:

* Flexibility/expressiveness: you can compose things as needed, without being held back by syntax rules. Here is a simple example, which is a bit silly but which illustrates the point:

(if (defun foo (x) (+ x 5)) 'yes 'no)

That is an "if" statement that follows the "yes" branch if the function is compiled without errors, and follows the "no" branch if there is an error. A bit pedantic, but let's put it this way: good luck doing that in C, C++, Java, or even Python.

* Error handling: What happens when you are writing to a file, but you run out of disk space? In Java and Python, you are out of luck: an exception is thrown, and now you have to pick up the pieces. In C or C++, your code needs to be littered with conditional statements that check if your I/O operations are successful. In Common Lisp, however, we have the restart construct, which allows the thrower of an exception to set up recovery routines that the handler can invoke. The top-level exception handler can present the user with recovery options, so for something like running out of disk space, the user might delete some files and invoke a restart that continues the I/O -- and the programmer need not clutter his code with routines for restarting the operation.

* Serialization is free. Kind of a pedantic point when you have things like Pickle, but it is even easier in Lisp -- no libraries needed. The caveat, though, is that some data cannot be serialized so easily, like objects in CLOS, but the metaobject protocol in most CL implementations solves that problem (A MOP are strangely absent from the Lisp standard, but most implementations include one anyway).

* Macros. When all else fails, macros are a lifesaver. Macros in Lisp have all the power of the Lisp programming language itself, at compile time -- so everything mentioned above is equally applicable. There is a strange recursive phenomenon to this argument: when all else fails in macro writing, you can create a deeper level of macros (it's macros all the way down). Macros are the reason for Lisp's unusual syntax, by the way: Lisp programs are written in a way that makes it easy for a macro to operate on a Lisp program.

Now, there are certainly things I do not like about CL, like the lack of any portable support for static typing (even an optional static type system), the poor collection of standard data structures, and the lack of support for modern things like sockets, threads, etc. Fortunately there are a lot of freely available libraries for such things, but a new standard that included them would be nice.
Well, I'm glad to see the health insurance situation is improving...
It doesn't have to do with oligarchy in the sense of coordinated corruption (wealth transfers) between rich and politicians, but in my opinion it comes close in terms of unfairness and bad long-term results, and it is still very coordinated between the rich and politicians.

The rich and powerful also profit from a society where people are educated and hard-working. If housing and student debts become such a burden that intelligent people well into child-bearing age (and halfway to retirement) have nearly no wealth and/or assets, while 1% of the populations hold 20% or more of total wealth, there is a problem. This problem will eventually reach this coalition of rich and politicians, but they are too short sighted to do something about it.

It is just so much easier at the moment for politicians to sustain their careers by pandering to a small group of rich people with the same interests then a large group of normal people with various interests. There are lots of reasons for this (right-to-lobby, corporate personhood, winner-take-all), but it's a big bug in the system when the majority feel unrepresented in a democracy. Arguing over whether 100 people or a few thousand control the top 1/3 of wealth only illustrates how big the issue of income inequality is.
"- Type classes: unifying things that "can do X", allowing the programmer to write functions that do similar things but work on many different types. A "sort" function can then be written for all things that "are containers of elements that can be compared". (Again, Rust adopts this.)"

This is what templates do in C++.
myeah it's a bit messy sometimes. But I yet have to encounter an UI design system that isn't? (ok, didn't try that many, and for example Labview is pretty nice since it gives you a working GUI with tons of features in no time, but for backend it's a disaster)
>Is there anyone else motivated by this like me?

Analytic philosophers tend to be.
I wish I could do that, but most of the time Amazon won't ship to my Australian address at all. It seems to be mostly the 3rd party sellers, though.
Sweet project! Can't wait to use it on my next project.
Love the fact that the developer is a musician and a UI developer.
I'll be spending the day coding in Processing, sadly missing from the list. I guess it's a vote for Other.
It's worth noting that CGI was also responsible for the ill-fated long gun registry in Canada, which was recently canceled due (in part) to massive cost overruns [1] and inability to cope with large numbers of users.

[1] http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry#Cost...
We use it at http://virtualstagingsolutions.com and rely heavily on file uploads. We started using it right when they launched (back when they were filepicker.io) and initially there were some bugs with resizing images. Lately everything has worked pretty well. Their support seems pretty responsive and I've only noticed 1 period of downtime within the last 6 months or so which completely made it impossible for our users to upload anything.

I'll admit that I'm not 100% comfortable using them because I'm really not sure where they are going in the future, by the looks of their pricing plans it seems like they would need huge scale to turn a profit and I just don't see them getting that scale at the moment.
Notifications on GitHub are still too coarsely-grained to be useful.
Ancient Archeological Sites That Were Destroyed By Stupid Humans
Indeed, but a cafe owner can accept bitcoins as payment for their goods, and then sell those same bitcoins to the public via the machine. This takes away some of the friction from bitcoins becoming just another payment form like credit cards.
My point was speed of development deployement,but you're not smart enough to get it whatever language you use.
"Don't leave your brain by the door."

The above should be the disclaimer on these types of books. I like Gladwell but there still needs to be some level of critical thinking involved when reading these books.

I like to take the main ideas and do further investigation on my own.
First steps in haskell
I am a movie-maker (obviously), and I know a lot of other experienced movie types too - happy to help with research.

Good starting points would be the current leaders in getting movies onto iTunes and Netflix: KinoNation and http://www.distribber.com/ .

The situation for filmmakers is so bad that the latter's offer to take 3+ months to get a single movie into iTunes for the low, low price of $1295 was - rightly - considered to be a massive leap forward for filmmakers worldwide.
I'm new with Rails but want to try this out- SO this would be an alternative to Paperclip?
That's $90 million :)
Do you mean back in 1988, or do you have some other date in mind? When exactly do you imagine this change occurred?
One thing about XSLT is that when it is bad it is really really bad.

It can be fairly elegant, especially if you know the difference between apply-templates and call-template and are happy with all of the feature of XPath. But I suspect that is fairly rare....
20/20 here too. Did not know a single black metal band, but on the basis of being Swedish I aced it with the following logic:

Swedish word? Ikea.
Not a Swedish word? Band.
Hey, Startups: Marketing = Sales
There's no performance issue that I'm aware of.

This is simply about coding style and an easy way to maintain it. The home page has a link to a Smashing Magazine article discussing this. In short, easy way to maintain coding style in a team environment.
I knew that it was a crazy project, with devs working ridiculous hours, changing requirements, etc. I was genuinely surprised when it performed so badly.
Declassified FBI CIPAV spyware documents (2009)
This is a false dichotomy - there is no reason that being factually accurate prevents writing from being entertaining and accessible. Both can be done in the same piece if the author is willing. It is unfortunate that many science writers don't care about good writing and many writers don't care about truth.
Fun fact: Grundtal means "cardinal number" in Swedish.
7 years of PHP projects: old, messy, legacy and new and fresh. I loathe PHP and never want to use it ever again.

Most I've talked to in person (yes, plural of anecdote is not data, etc) hate PHP because they've had a wonderful first-hand experience with it. This is in Sydney (Australia), where Ruby and Node is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to SF and the like.

Your post could do without the shitty attempt at sarcasm, but you've likely figured that out already.
If the argument though is "we can't have nice things because we screw it up", perhaps we need to look more at why America tends to screw these things up instead of taking away the lesson that we shouldn't try to have nice things.
Maybe it's time for another temporary ban on polls.
> The only thing missing in a mailing list is a good archive for new members; the web UIs are usually terrible. Personally, I wish I could just get an archive file (zip, tar, etc) of a certain period of time.

Three data points/opinions:

- at least some mailing lists let you download an archive file for a given month, e.g. [0].

- I much prefer navigating the web interface of a mailing list than navigating a forum, simply because most forums lack proper threading, not to mention the bazillion of blinking .GIFs, unnecessary Javascript and all that other superfluous crap that is completely irrelevant to the discussion.

- Not to mention that searching a mailing list archive is trivial if you keep it locally and even if you don’t, it will still work. Trying to find something on e.g. talk.maemo.org, I always have to resort to Google with some site: operator, and even then the results are usually worse than those returned by a comparable search run on the web archive of a mailing list.

[0] http://mail63.csoft.net/pipermail/ldmud-talk/
What other Groovy implementations are there?
Too Many Features Will Kill You
I agree with both your points--at least with respect to Guns Germs and Steel. Arguably he way overextended his basic research in later works.

An interesting supplement to Diamond is Ian Morris' Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. To greatly oversimplify, Morris endorses the idea of a Western core headstart (with credit to Diamond) but then basically says "Well, yeah, of course that's the case." But how does that explain how things ended up millennia later. A good read.

Another broader point though is that serious researchers are always going to put down popularizers who write books people actually read. But no one is going to read serious researchers except other serious researchers. Of course, you can go too far in the popularization direction and I tend to agree Malcolm Gladwell is a great example of that.
Elsewhere in this subthread I attest to medicare.gov's high quality.

But that said, why should your demonstrated competence translate into success in a program at its launch? Medicare and Medicaid were both established in 1965, long long before the web.

On the other hand, did you have the contract for medicare.gov when the Part D prescription program was launched in 2006? Given all the interfaces with providers that sounds vaguely comparable to this site.
> They are lightweight overviews of interesting insights, appealing to many people (enough so that some expend energy loudly criticizing the works), and providing launching points for those so motivated to further pursue the subject

What use is an overview if it's wrong?

Here's an example of the problem:

(http://www.social-consciousness.com/2013/10/ten-simple-thing...)

This blog got posted to HN. The first point in the post says:

> Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it's actually been proven to be an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's book, The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients treated their depression with either medication, exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study really surprised me. Although all three groups experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels to begin with, the follow up assessments proved to be radically different:

A blog cites a pop sci book, which cites a single study. And this is "proof" of a treatment for depression. It feels like it should be true. it repeats something that many people say ("exercise helps depression") and it has some sciencey stuff to support it (endorphins!). It's not homoeopathy or crystal healing.

The main problem is that it is not clear if exercise works for treating depression.

http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004366/exercise-for-depressi...

> Exercise is moderately more effective than no therapy for reducing symptoms of depression.

[...]

> The reviewers also note that when only high-quality studies were included, the difference between exercise and no therapy is less conclusive.

People do not investigate further. They repeat these factoids and they believe they're promoting science.
I absolutely despise Perl with every ounce of my body.

I'm not saying that it's a bad programming language. I'm also not saying it can't be used to create extremely useful software, or that you're not a great programmer if you only use Perl. I respect great Perl programmers just like every other great programmer. I worked at Yahoo, and from the code that I saw, there were only a few great programmers there. The rest wrote a piles of steaming code/shit that was almost impossible to understand.

However, the nuances about the language really rub me the wrong way and offend my own personal beliefs on how programming languages should be. I hate the array vs. scalar concept, the different ways to access them with various brackets and @/$, etc, and I especially hate that they have separate namespaces. I also hate things like "or" and "||" have different precedences. I did my best to learn perl, and wrote scripts at home to help me gain better knowledge, but once I discovered python, I ditched it and will never go back.
The Two Most Productivity Enhancing Scripts Ever Written in the History of Unix
If I didnt have to use the Microsoft Stack, I'd probably make my main language C# . I like the language, but dont want to use IIS, Windows Server et. al.

Give me (not mono) C# on linux and my choice of webserver and I'll change teams.
I certainly understand how a webpage is composited.

Do you think that browsers can currently "get access to the content" being displayed by plugins like Flash and Silverlight?
US Government shutdown cancels NIH study sections
NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source
Make the UAVs refuel by eating insects in the air?
> Making a nice unified mailing-list/forum hybrid doesn't sound impossible...

That's basically what Google Groups used to be (I haven't used them in awhile, so no clue if they've changed significantly since then): at its heart, it's NNTP. You choose to receive messages as they come, or in digest form. You can either reply to the email, or login to the web interface and reply there. The web interface groups discrete email subjects as separate forum posts (with some mild intelligence to lump "some topic" and "re: some topic" together).

It's not without its own set of issues, but I found it a good compromise since those who only wanted to interact with the email interface could keep that, while those that wanted a more full-featured forum experience could do so as well.
That's a risk of doing business. AirBnB and Uber are running similar risks against the political system (probably worse - they don't have ~half of the political system in their corner). Every other business is always risking that nobody will buy their product. Having any kind of promise of a guaranteed sale is a pretty luxurious position for any business.

If the risk is large enough that nobody takes it, then the procurement office can look at sweetening the deal (perhaps by increasing the payment per transaction, perhaps by offering some compensation for good faith effort if the legislation is revoked).

There is enormous overhead in bidding on and winning a government project. They're the reason the "37signals" of the world isn't doing them even even though they could probably execute much better on them.
Acer’s $249 C720 Chromebook launched: Thinner, longer lasting, and Haswell
SSL Performance Overhead in MySQL
Tell him it's only $100, but he has to buy at least 100 copies. Then see what MS spent on Windows and how many copies they had to sell to pay for it.
Sha Ka Ree!
First thanks, Coffeescript saved me days of work.

But I can understand , because it's popular , some people feel like they are forced to understand or learn it.

Yet you can be proud that Coffeescript influenced the latest ES spec, that's all that matters , you pushed Javascript forward, by saying "Dont wait for other to make the stuff you need, do your own stuff and eventually people will wake up and adress your intial issue".
I almost hesitate to say it, but I did read the article hoping to find the average airspeed velocity of a slightly-laden European-African swift. I feel as though the BBC would have included this important information.
If cooking up a sensational metric does the trick then why not?

Because you turn away people. I'm a conservationist that just happens to think regardless of climate change that it just makes sense to preserve finite resources like fossil fuels and clean air. When you start to use bullshit to further our similar cause, then you hurt our cause when the bullshit is exposed.

I actually saw the headline and excitedly clicked on it. I was excited because with all the talk of climate change I feel like I never see anything other than abstract predictions of "x degree C raise in global temperature". I thought FINALLY tell me when coastal regions of New Jersey are going to be permanently underwater. No such luck - more abstract bullshit masquerading as something it's not. You have no idea how much this hurts people's belief in climate issues.
realise that ORMs are inherently stupid.

That's quite the claim... Care to expand on why you think ORMs are "inherently stupid"?
I have used this in many projects. It is really nice, clients love it and I can make do it pretty much anything I need it to even CORs uploads.
Or ride thermals.
Actually, at large defense contractors there is significant pressure not to bill more than 40 hours per week. It (theoretically) keeps costs down and makes the contractor more appealing for future work. It skews the actuals all to hell, though, because on paper it looks like a project took X hours when it actually took 1.2X hours because everyone was working an average of 48 hours a week but only billing 40. In some cases it can skew even worse. I had a couple workaholic co-workers who regularly put in 25+ unpaid extra hours.

The government doesn't particularly like this, but they usually don't clamp down on the practice. They do get upset when contractors knowingly distort their bids with estimates of this, though. Marietta, before they got rolled up into Lockheed Martin via mergers, once got in trouble because they submitted a bid wherein they assumed "full-time" would be 43 hours per week and set their time projections accordingly. The government auditors were pissed when they found out.
It's really cons lists that are harmful -- foldl and foldr are just ways to operate on them. GP's example would work fine with conc trees and a divide-and-conquer reduce instead.
Drone Pilot Fights for Right to Profit in the Unmanned Skies
Given that the title of the article that started this discussion is, "We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404". I'd say it is fair to point out that actual cost was ten times less than is claimed in the article. I agree that no-bid contracts are bad, but they certainly are not unprecedented. I guess I am just not getting the outrage other people seem to have here. Maybe because I am not against ACA?
What? No matlab/octave?
I can tell you I've done 10 minutes of C# programming in my life, while addressing a StackOverflow comment, and in that 10 minutes I found something that worked on Microsoft's .NET runtime but not on Mono. You don't need experience to find evidence.
I agree it probably should be left as an unsupported hack since it would be a support nightmare.

After thinking about it a bit I think that it'll never actually happen. It's a weird feature combination that would confuse non-geek consumers.

Who knows maybe Nest would want to reserve that kind of thing for another shiny new product to hang on your wall and could price at 150+
> Disc technology is dead,

Apart from second-hand games. Or local play. Or slow connections. Or ....
A Letter to Evernote
Yes, there is this special method of determining future ecological catastrophes, it's called: bullshit propaganda.
Login And Pay With Amazon – Yesterday’s launch will change the face of retail
How prismic.io scales dynamic content as if it were static
Would you want to live in Russia or China?
What the Government Does with Americans' Data [pdf]