skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is strange how far things have come. Many years (1980-90s) ago when people would start these long rants about how "the US is a police state" etc everyone would just look at them like they were a little unhinged, then after 9/11 everyone started joking about how it was "true," now everyone has stopped laughing and when the topic comes up the tone is what I would call "genuine concern" mixed with nervous laughter.

The US police have become extremely militarised. The TSA and CBP have turned damn right hostile. And it seems like nobody in any kind of authority position has any common sense left, I still remember when that chick from MIT entered the airport with a bunch of LED in a t-shirt and how instead of everyone laughing about the "funny misunderstanding" everyone was condemning her and she got charged with some nonsense "crime."

Seriously has the whole world gone insane? I feel like I am the only one left with any concept of proportionality and understanding of the difference between a legitimate threat and a misunderstanding.

On a related note: Why are SWAT now being used in no-knock arrests when there is no knowledge of weapons on the property and they often aren't even collecting time critical evidence? Why can cops not just knock on the door politely and arrest a suspect?
The reason many publishers prefer MS Word is that it is the best choice at the editing stage. It is much easier to find copy-editors who will be able work efficiently with Word than any other system, with Adobe Indesign/Incopy being a distant second.

It would be possible to grow a tool infrastructure around Latex (and/or Context) to eliminate the practical problems working with that system, but at present it does not exist.

Word's support for change tracking is very good. Change-tracking is a very different thing to version control: version control is about storing and reconciling difference versions of a file, while change tracking is about communicating the changes made for the other person to check. If I edit your text, I can switch change tracking on and off, so that the relevant changes I have made to your writing are visible for you to step through one-by-one, while the changes my macros made to make font choices consistent are untracked, so will not waste your time when you review the text. If version control and change tracking overlap somewhat in functionality, they have different uses and fundamentally different semantics.
Unfortunately many of the people the TSA impact aren't American at all. We have nothing to do with your democratic system, no matter how disfunctional it is.
Yup. Same page.
How did this post drop from rank 3 to rank 148 within 5 minutes? Interesting algorithm at work here...
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"

When your job is (mostly) a sham, you'd better make it seem important if you want to keep it. I've met people (in big corporations and universities) who are masters of seeming important while doing very little, but those people tend to really stand out when they're inserted in small companies (i.e. start-ups).
Isn't "this course will change your life" just as simple? They don't learn the 'mumbo-jumbo' until they attend the class.
Wouldn't that just cause inflation?
Not ad hominem, they didn't say they were wrong because they feel smart.

Sigh.
How do you decide which material suits which students the best? What they enjoy the most?

If you have a class of 20 , how can you teach 20 different curriculum?
I'd like solution #4 as part of solution #3 please ... now we just need someone in DC to listen to what we want.
Yes, I know. Why is the reform movement unified as to pre-college, but not as to college?
Ultra light fonts are made for headlines, not for body copy. They lead to very even gray levels, which is great if you don't want to read the text. If you want to, though, it's a real strain on the eyes.

Edit:
See font designer Erik Spiekermann on the topic (English captions are available): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw0syzCeH4Q
Couldn't you just counter this by not taking the insurance and returning the car with a full tank? What are they going to do, empty it and then charge you again to fill it up?
Why I moved from Linux to Mac OS X (2006): Oh, hey, it's a beautiful Unix laptop and it doesn't need any tweaking for the wi-fi to work. I'll buy this and recommend it to my family also.

Why I moved from Mac OS X to Linux (2012): They're obviously pushing for a walled garden experience just like the iPhone, which is reprehensible enough on its own to warrant a boycott against the whole company.

The PC users laughing that you cannot change the parts are right. It reduces quite a lot of the expense if you can swap out just the CPU or just the GPU. But hey, let's glue the ram into out laptops and overcharge for real capacity.

What's this thing Objective-C developers were tweeting this week, you have to be pre-approved to get a certificate that signs kexts? Fuck Apple, I'm tired of it and I have learned my lesson. I'm going with Android or Firefox OS for mobile and Linux or BSD for computing.
> $PHILOSOPHY thought is not abstruse, it is often flat and obvious, once you get it.

I've found this to be very true in general. That journey can often be difficult, though.
Why is Aspergers presented as a third option? I'm pretty sure having AS doesn't just take you off the Introvert/Extrovert spectrum. And while many people with AS are introverted, it isn't always the case.

I feel like this might've made more sense as two different polls.
You would need to make living on $6000 a year practical as well. It's not as hard as people think, as if you're not working you don't need to locate yourself in a city or bother with transportation, but there are structural changes that need to be made. The big two are probably housing deregulation (consisting of (i) seriously scaling back zoning laws and (ii) removing laws limiting occupation density) and fixing the health care system (no easy answers there). It's a complicated issue.
You also can't yell "FIRE" in a crowded theater ... but I think this article was talking about being arrested for discussing how ludicrous the whole process is.
In most parts of the world 10k+ intervals have been standard for a long time.
R.I.P Dennis M. Ritchie
I've tried to post yesterday but somehow my post hasn't been submit. I don't know why and i don't want to know.

Well, it's good to remember a genius who left us.

R.I.P Dennis M. Ritchie - We love you

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
That's not a feel-good aphorism. That's a principle that is at the core of religions and philosophies practiced by billions. It's not universally applied, but people are actively trying to teach it.
People flagged it, because the discussion has been had on HN before and it tends to go poorly.

This submission also involves the hateful Gove, a clueless fuckwit of the highest order.

(http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jun/18/michael-gov...)

Here's another article from The Grauniad involving Gove, who calls for a return to teaching "Newton's laws of thermodynamics". The Guardian make no mention of that error.

https://paulbraterman.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/newton-thermo...
I tried doing that in Word once, it's nowhere near the solid foundation that actual style sheets provide (thinking of CSS/HTML here).

I only needed to style H1, H2, P, EM and possibly A (they don't have those names in Word, but you get the point). That's probably the simplest document structures you can have for a task that reasonably makes use of styles.

The biggest problem was, those styles are like liquid, slipping between your fingers as you work with them. You do one thing to the text and suddenly you find yourself in a style that's "adapted" from a style you've already defined, I think I've even encountered a new hybrid style between two of my user-defined ones. And then there's of course the "built in" paragraph and heading styles, occasionally thrown into the mix as well.

The point is, this is not at all like an actual style sheet based way of working, such as with CSS/HTML. You could get the above result by using (bad) code such as <h2><p><em>OOPS</em></p></h2>, you'd also get a mix of three styles. But the thing is, in Word, all these new hybrid styles got added to the style sheet!

So get this, I wrote part of a document, decided (as long as I have to do this in Word ..) I'd use style sheets, made the styles, continued writing on the document and the existing styles changed as I moved bits of text around.

Not having exactly that happen, is one of the main reasons to have a strict separation of content and style in the first place, is it not?

I'm sorry but, I don't think Word actually supports "styles". It's got some stuff that kind of looks like styles, but once you actually try to use it, it'll just waste your time at exactly those moments where you'd expect a proper styles system to save you time.

At some point I had finished the content and I decided to make the H2 a bit bigger font. With styles that should be the easiest thing right? Haha! Right. That's when you get to see all the adapted styles that suddenly appeared in your H2's markup, and they don't change along. So instead of just changing your styles, you are going to have to edit your document content anyway.

The whole experience was very, very messy. In hindsight I'd have preferred to keep the "style sheet" in my head and apply all the markup manually, like most people do, instead of relying on the program to take care of this for me, but wasting my time instead. No wonder that's the route most people seem to take.

(disclaimer: this experience was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it by now and styles are actually styles and don't change while editing your content, and are in fact either applied to some part of the content or not, and not somewhere in between)
Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA) | Intel Developer Zone
The author seems to be forgetting two related things. The first one is that the number of users of computers has increased by orders of magnitude in the past couple of decades. He looks back longingly at people doing complex stuff on Access back in the day, yet I would not be surprised if there were as many of those cases today, probably even more. Simply, their number now seems relatively much smaller. Computing is now a tool for everybody, not just for Western office men.

Which brings us to the second issue: for most people, computing is just a tool to solve problems that they encounter in real life. These problems have nothing to do with computing in the first place so, understandably, people tend to prefer solutions that allow them to focus on their actual problem rather than on the developer's own problems.
Thank you! That was insightful. Cheers.
The only reason a joke wastes time and causes panic & disruption is the idiotic overreaction to something harmless.
“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” -- Jack Handy.
Pulp Fiction seems to have lots of useless stuff in it.
I would imagine some serious work on graphics drivers and hardware recognition as well. Running it on 'old wrecks' with nvidia cards could be fun if not.

I think the marketing is to non-technical users and I get the subtext about 'parent's computer' meaning students/pupils who might not have a box of their own.
Man died after overdosing on caffeine mints
This is a straw man, right? Not all bugs are payment security bugs. Not all bugs are harmful to users. And spending more time writing cleaner code does not mean you'll have fewer bugs.
Why would a "competent, intelligent human being with discretion" choose such a crappy job in the first place?
Golly, real life is starting to look like Half Life 2.
Some Thoughts on Education and Political Priorities
Actually playing games under linux right now is extremely easy. A lot of stuff runs on wine or native.

The VGA passtrough on my new rig took roughly 1 hour to set up (the reason I chose non-K processor) and is working like a charm. So i can play anything I want on a clean W8 install. And that is on Arch - not the easiest distro to work with.
> They're obviously pushing for a walled garden experience just like the iPhone, which is reprehensible enough on its own to warrant a boycott against the whole company.

There's no evidence they're doing this. For average users there's signed applications, and it's literally a single checkbox to disable them if you don't like it. There's also no requirement for any applications to be signed.

> It reduces quite a lot of the expense if you can swap out just the CPU or just the GPU.

You have never, ever been able to do this with an Apple laptop.
it's exactly what you describe and it's special because of it:

http://www.keepod.com/about/
> Unfortunately, TSA checkers have no discretion: they're supposed to behave like robots[1]. They're not allowed to write off a wisecrack as a joke, but are required to take it at face value. (Even though no sane terrorist would joke about smuggling a bomb through a TSA checkpoint while in the queue at said checkpoint.)

And it's not even new. See all the people dragged off for intimate searches by latex gloved customs inspectors after their pal joked about drugs.
Actually I was not sarcastic at all. I really loved that sentence as I too have a penchant for long-winding sentences that are hard to parse but in closer inspection have no noise and every word in them is essential. Comes from my days of reading Aristotle where it is not uncommon to have a page of only two sentences. Or look at the Declaration of Independence or the Treaty of Paris for more recent examples of page-sized sentences. I think it shows how far downhill we've gone in terms of literacy or perhaps even mental capacity. Yours, while not in the same league, was a sentence I really liked and it never occurred to me that people might construe my comment as sarcastic.
I'm a litigator who continues to be amazed by the page formatting requirements in courts around the country. Especially at the appellate level, it can take hours to find and then implement all of the requirements. Worse, all documents are then converted to PDF, making them even less useful.

What's crazy is that most briefs are actually just a series of links: cite to Case A, B; cite to document C; cite to statute C...Sometimes attorneys will make "e-briefs" to actually link PDFs, but those usually cost thousands of dollars to manually generate.

I'm working on an open-source court filing project that would let attorneys and the court write and post everything in an electronic format for easy linking and search. Think of it as a free, universal ECF/PACER for state courts. If anyone is interested in helping, feel free to drop me a line.
>It is important to realize that there is a heavy strain of racial superiority thinking in the English upper class. As far as I know, there is nothing similar anywhere in Europe today.

If we put weight on genetics, English style slow social mobility class system would be the worst kind.

Some biologists have theorized that rigid class system has kept the genetic differences between classes minimal. Lowest peasants have same amount of genetic advantages and disadvantages as upper class because there was minimal mixing between them. In the modern times when class structure collapses and social mobility increases it will be different. Successful and beautiful people move to big cities where they meet each others and mate (Finland and Nordic countries have high social mobility). New upper class will form that self selects it's members based on personal traits and performance. This would mean that new upper class will be more beautiful, fit and intelligent and genetic disadvantages will concentrate on lower classes. In other words, if genetics is important, giving equal opportunity to all children and high social mobility will create upper class with better genetics.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-...
Because they need the money? Many people have little choice in the work they do. It's this shitty job or that shitty job or no job.
Fair enough. I must have used more relevant subheadings than I thought!
Not necessarily. The methods used to confirm the Hypothesis could be used in other related fields. The techniques used to solve the Hypothesis could potentially be applied to break RSA. I've read there are similarities between the Riemann Hypothesis and RSA's workings.
You can download the PDF versions here:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/804396/some-thoughts-o...

Unfortunately, the file is embedded on the Guardian website and can only viewed online.
don't worry, Half life 3 will do its job
Ah, thanks for this. It is interesting, because on the photo shown in the article you can see both gove and the adviser, and gove seems to be an obvious "fuckwit", and the adviser an obvious nerd. So I would separate advised from the adviser here, and focus on the content of the paper which is very interesting. Disappointing HN community.
DRM/EME in HTML5 - an American thing
People have often and for decades got into trouble for "joking" about having a bomb in their bags at check-in, and we've always lamented the institutionalised stupidity of the drones behind the counter (and their dull bosses) for not realising that humans are mostly not very good at comedy.

However, this is another thing entirely, and reminds me of the practice in Nazi occupied terriroties of having loudspeakers in the street to control, order and relay propaganda to the restless occupied. I don't think Godwin's Law counts here either. This is a legitimate comparison.
Delayed gratification is the single most important measurable personality trait that determines success later in life. IQ is less important than delayed gratification. High IQ and other traits are just potential for success. Delayed gratification is what turns these traits into success.
They'd better try shutting engine down completely during flight and restarting it. That would mean much more than these hops.
I,be seen IKEA furniture as hostnames. Advantage: Easy access through IKEA website and continuously new names.
There's no magic. Sit down and draw up a list of:

* 5 ice breaker questions (you don't need more, 1 is really enough but us geeks feel guilty reusing conversation where good conversationalists reuse everything all the time)
* 10 general life stories about you from completely different aspects.

Now practice telling these. Deliver them slower than you think is right because you'll naturally tend to aim for efficiency but what you should aim for is being interesting.

Use open body language in the mirror while practicing.

Smile.

I think anyone can do this really and this puts you in the top 25%. Seriously even normal less techie people are terrible at this too so have heart!
Discriminating Women
Cultural note: Bristol University have some nice cryptography stuff going on. They also have links to GCHQ via the Heilbronn Institute.

(http://www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/research/research-group...)

(http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/research/heilbronn_institute/)
I agree with you that things are worse now. I wouldn't say that the world has gone insane though, rather that the US attitudes have shifted over time. There are countries that does things differently though. For example, the worlds fourth and eight largest economies:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-l...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19641398
Rhino Shield
I don't think the wet markets pay taxes or are subject to much gov interference. A lot of Thais buy groceries at Tescos, its not just a "foreigner" thing. You also can't buy everything in a farmer's market, and at any rate, you aren't quite sure what you are getting.

Living in china, we are more worried about safe food than cheap food, not sure if Thailand has similar problems. 便宜没好货，好货不便宜 as they say.
Society as a whole is really trying to please the lowest common denominator. In the past if someone made an obvious joke and then someone else got "offended" or "afraid" from it they would have been instantly scolded for being a bit dim and to be on their merry way.

But these days it seems like we're in "offense wars" where we must protect everyone's delicate sensibilities because offending or scaring a stupid person is almost a crime in its own right (see parents who run around attacking photographers who steal their kid's souls with cameras).

When has someone overhearing a joke at the airport ever prevented a terrorist attack? Never is the answer. Just stupid people complaining and stupid people "following orders" and conducting a completely disproportionate investigation into something everyone knows for a fact won't lead anywhere. "See something report something" is just a moronic as "stranger danger" and all of those sayings. Use common sense. Think about things. Stop being sheep.
Why do many people have little choice in the work they do?

Are you talking about short time scales, or periods of years?
That pdf says nothing about who is or is not looking for work.
Nokia & Bristol University work on bringing quantum cryptography to smartphone
I think reddit is way ahead of you. The amount of fanboyism there is ridiculous (I'm an admirer myself but some of the worshipping is crazy there).
One Possible Future for Movies: Projecting Them in 270 Degrees
QWERTY was designed so that all the characters in the word "TYPEWRITER" were located in the top row :) And this is quite easy to verify - coincidence? Does it improve its ergonomy? Well I'm not typing "typewriter" all day long, but first salesmen who marketed the device - did :) They're long gone, however, but suboptimal layout remained. As the man said, there's nothing more permanent than temporary solutions...
Godwin's Law states nothing about the legitimacy of said comparison—it applies to literally every online discussion.
The article was from 1996, I think you'd be hard pressed to suggest an OS that was better suited for the average user than Windows 95 was at the time. I say this as someone who was still running OS/2 at the time (with a Dvorak layout of course), but that was due more to me being ideologically driven (go Team OS/2!) than Reason. Network effects are only one feature that appeals to end users, but they aren't the first.
This is being way overblown. This warning is ominous and far too broadly worded. However, if the TSA brings in law enforcement and requests that you be arrested, that officer (not an agent of the TSA) must determine that there is probable cause to believe that you have violated a specific state or federal statute in order to arrest you. There are statutes concerning making statements about bombs, terror threats, etc. in a secure area, but your innocent jokes are fine.

This is not to say that TSA can't detain you and ruin your day for essentially any reason, but any joke or comment that doesn't actually violate a state or federal statute will not result in your arrest.
He was a genius :( RIP Dennis Ritchie
A Docker Container folder structure that’s flexible and scales | ijonas.com
From the Start, Signs of Trouble at Health Portal
Not if you finance it through taxes and elimination of other programs for the very poor like food stamps.
The Petrie Multiplier: Why an Attack on Sexism in Tech is Not an Attack on Men
Richard Branson helps build non-profits from Necker Islan
Sort of reminds me of Jolicloud, based on its focus on web-apps (from the screenshots anyway, it does allow for native apps though, just like Joli OS).

I actually ran Joli OS on a UNetBootin-ed USB with persistent storage setup. It works quite well, but I'll be perfectly honest, in this day and age it's rare that I have a computer that is:

a) Not mine
b) Allows me to reboot into another OS from a USB

And most importantly, I've always got my laptop with me anyway. I can see the appeal, but I'm unsure of the real-world practicality outside of a small niche.

That said, this is from a first-world upper-middle-class perspective here. It may have potential in places where computers are shared amongst a lot of people perhaps?