skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As an US RKBA activist since the early '70s (sic), I watched it from a distance in horrified fascination, and the Wikipedia section you cite matches my memories, that while the IT component was nasty and much bigger than expected/hoped/etc., it wasn't what crushed the registry. The job, including most especially human processing effort, was just massively larger than anticipated and was therefore not even vaguely covered by the statutory fees.
There's an argument that Bezos is forgoing short-term profits by re-investing those into growing the business (expanding into AWS, marketplaces, Zappos, Kindle, streaming media, etc, etc) and into aggressively competing on price to not leave much excess oxygen in the room for competitors.

That's very different from the potential profit profile if Amazon were seeking to maximize near-term profit as opposed to maximizing near-term growth, with the expectation that that maximizes long-term profit.
Some context I didn't know before:

> The production of foie gras (the liver of a duck or a goose that has been specially fattened) involves the controversial force-feeding of birds with more food than they would eat in the wild, and more than they would voluntarily eat domestically. The feed, usually corn boiled with fat (to facilitate ingestion), deposits large amounts of fat in the liver, thereby producing the buttery consistency sought by some gastronomes.

Animal welfare controversy aside, I would imagine this suggests they are prematurely exploiting their user base in a non-sustainable manner. If only the customers (I assume the shareholders are their customers?) would care that this tarnishes the brand in the long run.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras_controversy
Reading your comment, I felt like I was reading my own thoughts written down by someone far more eloquent than me. Thank you. To anyone reading this, evilduck has a perfect description of why I constantly tell my company "no" when they try to put me on this shit.
I'm not sure where the idea originated that readability scales inversely with the number of parentheses, but I wish it would hurry up and die.
I'm surprised at the lack of love for Groovy. Groovy rocks... I made the decision to switch all of our development to Groovy (and Grails) a couple of years ago, and I haven't regretted the move at all... it's gone astonishingly well. Much faster development than in raw Java, but without a huge learning curve, and yet still with seamless integration with existing Java libraries, plus more than a few very cool native Groovy libraries. What's not to like?
The Pattern Interrupt
> You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in.

While not standardised, I expect any decent e-mail client to handle mailing lists mostly automatically at least in that regard, e.g. Claws-Mail builds a nice menu from List-* headers. It is true that one usually needs to manually add filtering on the server side (in Sieve, maildrop or whatever you use), which is not as nice as the standard handling of news, but you can even automatise that if you’re willing to have emails containing random headers create the corresponding folders (which, of course, you shouldn't do).

> I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway.

Most email clients also have NNTP support baked in, so the client side is not really an issue. However, newsservers have to keep at least a rolling archive of messages and possibly federate with others, whereas a mailman installation is mostly stand-alone and doesn’t even have to keep an archive if you don’t want to.
Don't be silly. UAVs eat micro-USVs.
Ecommerce Marketplace
I have wondered what the legal implication of revoking certificates after complying with a court order to turn over private keys would be. I assume that the court would hole you in contempt for doing so, but IANAL.
I'm a little familiar with IKEA stuff and not at all familiar with the bands, and I got 13/20. I recognized a couple of IKEA names, so those were easy. Otherwise, I pretty much used the heuristic of, "if this is reasonably pronounceable by the average American, it's probably IKEA". That didn't work great, but it seems to have done better than chance.
Remember that Levinson was not just a private contractor looking for work; taking time to build a whole new wiretapping system into his product wouldn't just cost him development time, but it's an opportunity cost as well, since he could have spent that time otherwise developing his business.

As for the triviality of implementing a metadata tap, I don't think the FBI was looking just for Snowden's IP address and browser. IIRC, they wanted metadata from his communications: email titles, recipient email addresses, time of transmission, etc. Lavabit was designed in a way that this was impossible. Levinson would have had to implement a system that flagged particular users and then saved metadata before encryption.

In a production, business environment, this isn't just a one-liner. Especially given the security-focused nature of Lavabit, the required development time and effort makes $3500 appropriate for the task.
Cheers for the downvotes!

Re: motion sickness.

Oculus (Rift) are aware that this is a problem with their product and they have not solved it.

If you think about it, having better tracking sensors than the VR headsets of the 90's does not do anything to fix the fundamental problem: your eyes getting different inputs to what the body is getting. If your eyes are telling you that you are falling but your stomach and ear canals are telling you that you are still sat on your arse in your mom's basement then you just might start feeling sick. Improved gyros in the headset are not going to magically create some anti-gravity field for you, are they?

As for the 'you have not tried this particular brand of VR headset and therefore you don't know what you are on about', line of argument, true I have not tried these particular VR headset novelty devices yet. However, I have also yet to try a 2013 model 3D TV but, from having seen how the 2010 3D TV's had their failings I can fairly predict that the 2013 3D TV's have not addressed the fundamental failings that the 2010 models had and are therefore unlikely to take the market by storm.

I am merely sharing the same level of scepticism that the BBC had regarding this particular product:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23877695

We have seen it all before and people just don't want to wear some clumsy headset in their living room, whether that is to watch a movie, to be 'in' a game or anything else. Even without the motion sickness problem this product would be only for a few gamers with more money and sense.
XAML is the awful part of WPF. The reasoning behind it is understandable, but this whole "declarative ui" thing brings with itself a whole bunch of abstractions, like resource dictionaries, styles etc, that you wouldn't need if you do your ui in code. And sometimes code-only wpf is the only way to get good performance from it.
> There's a previous track record of success

Where? Definitely not the Canadian Firearms Registry, or the sites listed previously.
Also I see no reason why this is any more subjective than it claims—it's not asking for which language is some ill-defined notion of "best" but instead which ones people "like".

I think it's perfectly reasonable to dislike a language you've never used. You can't claim it's a "bad" language (for reasons perhaps even above not having a definition for "bad") but I can't claim that you don't dislike it.
I think I read about this in Snow Crash.
Relevant quote from the current HN thread History Must Be Curved:

"Science doesn’t follow a mythic positivist ideal but the plural scientific methods described by Feyerabend: a mixture of empiricism, flights of fancy, intuition, aesthetics, doggedness, and jealousy. Scientific theories are underdetermined. Any finite set of facts can support multiple theories, and for a long time the available facts were equally explained by geostationary or geomobile models."
I voted dislike to PHP despite not having used it. I read an article listing a fairly significant number of fairly fundamentally broken thing and gotchas many of which fail silently and keep running corrupting data and I decided that I didn't want to go near it.

I don't want to use it and even go to the extent of avoiding open source software that does. It isn't about cool points but purely about whether I want to use the language.

I like types and type checking and halting with exceptions on errors. Do I think that makes me cool; no, but it does make me dislike PHP and use Postgres rather than MySQL (even before my Oracle aversion became relevant).

Edit: This was the article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
I didn't down vote those or other languages I haven't really used. But you honestly can't think of any feature of those languages that might turn people off? ((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((? any)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
You're missing the most dreadful language in existence: Report Program Generator (RPG).
I don't understand that attitude. First, you can use C# really well without depending on any Microsoft tech. Second, Microsoft standardized the language and made a community promise not to enforce their C#-related patents (like e.g. Oracle did against Google for Java).

So, it free, it has full FOSS tooling. What's the problem?
As of now, Python wins both:

- in absolute likes (1167)

- in like/dislike ratio (1167/161=7,25)
This seems a little confusing to me. I'm using the site linked in one of the previous comments:

http://usaspending.gov/explore?tab=By+Prime+Awardee&fiscal_y...

This shows the $634M headline number as the amount of contracts paid to CGI Federal over a ~6 year period. It is filtered based on solicitation number HHSM500200700015I.

A little googling returns the following page: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=f1522d0...

"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) intends to modify the PECOS contract to
support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) requiremnts for the
Development, Maintenance and Enhancements of HITECH Registration, Attestation and Inquiry Functionalities.
This work is already on the contract, the modification will incorporate costs for the option years."

So there's not really a lot of detail on what the HHSM500200700015I solicitation actually entails, and I haven't found a clear description everywhere else. It looks like it could cover a pretty broad set of work. For example, the ACA was signed in March 2010, but there's contracts tied to this solicitation number that go back to 2008-2009.

A few of the news sites linked below imply that the $634M covers the total number of Medicare and PECOS contracts awarded by HHS to CGI, and that the ACA website cost only $93M, which makes it seem cheap compared to the private sites listed in the Digital Trends article:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/canadian-firm-hired-to-build-t...
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/09/3-million-obamacare-w...

Before we all explode in outrage, are we sure that we are reading the details of this correctly?
That line bothers me for a different reason: it is not true. Nothing in Lavabit's design prevented Ladar from tapping any one user's communications. In fact, the entire design of Lavabit makes it possible, since all cryptographic operations are performed server-side.

What the line should say is, "Thanks to Lavabit's design, Ladar would have had to spend half an hour coding a wiretapping solutoin."
Yes, there are some backwards compatibility artifacts in the language. I like how verbose it is, little room for ambiguity when sharing code with lesser-experienced programmers. C# is efficient, but a bit cryptic for people not well-versed on c-style languages. Also, curly braces.
I'm going to fiddle with that benchmark[1] later this weekend. I have an inkling that some of the languages could have better performance. There is also a difference between a web based game and a traditional application server game.

[1]: http://blog.juiceboxmobile.com/2012/11/20/benchmarking-web-f...
As an F# MVP, I can tell you MS is committed to the primary functional language on the .NET stack, but more importantly MS has open-sourced F# https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp. The membership of the FSharp Software Foundation http://fsharp.org/ is very active and growing under the informal leadership of Don Syme. F# works today across Linux, iOS, and Android with a community of OSS programmers improving x-platform interop almost on a daily basis.
Where is haxe language? :)
Science doesn’t follow a mythic positivist ideal but the plural scientific methods described by Feyerabend: a mixture of empiricism, flights of fancy, intuition, aesthetics, doggedness, and jealousy. Scientific theories are underdetermined. Any finite set of facts can support multiple theories, and for a long time the available facts were equally explained by geostationary or geomobile models.

This marvelously addresses the current HN thread Should We Stop Believing Malcolm Gladwell?.
I was inspired by a thread similar to this one several weeks ago to memorize a few digits of pi. I don't think it helped me in any way, but I like the imperative to recognize and identify simple patterns. It's just the right mix of hard and easy. It's not every day, but I often just grab a pen or New text file and start recalling.

The patterns are what draw me. How I remember it changes slightly (as I forget old patterns) over time but today: I go by groups of 5, 100 digits. There's the 8-2-2-8 near the beginning (w/ 2^3=8, & reversed), the 5-4-6-3 right after. The 5-7-5-7 (w/ 7 49, then 7, 81, 64) comes next. The permutations of 02668, the 34s, etc.

The thing is: the numbers are random(ish), but the patterns are there. The mind can find patterns in anything, you just have to cultivate it.

Do you think card-deck-memory could pull off any magic tricks? Pi isn't really a crowd pleaser.. :|
What's the concern? Is there any reason why disliking a language for reasons of fashion is bad?

I personally think that I'd maybe prefer not to work with someone who likes (and argues) for languages due to fashion... but I'm also a by-day-and-night Haskell developer, so I imagine that invalidates my opinion in some ways.
"The CBS video also claims there have been only "a handful" of sign ups, and it's getting reported in lots of other places. It could be inaccurate, but these are mainstream outlets reporting this, not Breitbart or Drudge. "

This. A Washington Post reporter talks to one random (and anonymous) insurance guy (with who knows what kind of political baggage) who gives them a single quote. They run with it, other news organizations re-run it (repeat x100) assuming it's fact because the Washington Post is a "mainstream" outlet right? And them whammo you have a whole group of people thinking that under 10 people were able to signup for health care. Even if they don't literally think this, the PR damage is done. The perception is now cemented that the launch is a failure because of a "Washington Post report" (sounds official doesn't it?)

Just because a news organization is "mainstream" does not mean it does not carry with it a truckload of bias (see FoxNews/MSNBC).
No mention of CFScript
I can't sign up without js enabled. Should this site especially adhere to strict accessibility standards?
That's why i think if we want to debate if the society is 'fair' or not, we should think about income distribution, not wealth distibution. Even for the majority of the people considered 'rich' (top 1% by income), most of the income is not derived from assets/wealth, but from work. So wealth does not play a big role in living standards of vast majority of Americans, even most rich ones.
I would like to shoot you an email as well, if you don't mind. I left my defense aerospace job after 9.5 years because I just couldn't make it work in that kind of Dilbert-esque environment. I gave it 9.5 years because I really love the problems, the systems, and the technology.
I don't think you are going to win any points here considering the outcome.
I think this qualifies as one of those features users never use therefore it can be deprecated and removed.
While many of us would argue with the "nice things" concept (ScottWhigham grossly overestimates the nation's enthusiasm for socialism at the beginning of this thread), it doesn't take away from his point that it's stupid to try such grand projects while we have a demonstrated inability to do them.

I mean, the government is taking control of 1/6 of the nation's economy, why ever did the Obamacare enthusiasts think this would work even vaguely well???
To be really honest, a Lisp programmer doesn't really see that many parens in his code. And clojure doesn't even have those many parens. Maybe its just me, but I have only seen those who haven't used Lisp complain about too many parenthesis.
For me, it just feels like instead of taking efforts to carefully design the language, they just picked the first thing that worked and froze it. And while I really like some features of the type system (such as interfaces, lambda/function types, multiple return values, and the "type switch"), the lack of overloading and generics does have some pretty serious effects on readability (especially when you have compiler-supported functions that do overloading and generics, but don't allow it in userland).

It also seems like the way they resolved a lot of issues in the surrounding tooling was to not decide. For example: how many spaces should we use? Screw it, we'll use hard tabs! How should we handle dependency loading and package management? Screw it, we'll hard-code the URL to our dependencies in the source code! How to handle dependency versions? Screw it, we won't!

It's not a horrible language (like shellscript), but I think they wasted a lot of opportunity to make something better.
I guess that liking or not, depends on how much you like the features, to forget/forgive/disregard it's drawbacks.
For example, Python has drawbacks ... but, I do LOVE the language, is just such I joy to code in Python, that I just dont care that much about its problems. For me, is the same for C and Lua
But, for C++, is the oposite. I do like some of its features, but, overall, I really hate the language. Too much headaches and pitfalls. And it's the same for javascript.
But, hey, it's a personal opinion. I do really respect brendan eich as a developer, even lot liking javascript.
Slightly related, but here's a recent article on a "Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years". I think this was submitted recently and didn't take off, but it's pretty interesting:

http://lasvegas.cbslocal.com/2013/10/07/aerospace-company-de...
I've been working on a mobile POS for vendors at markets and fairs for the last year or so. I built it mainly so that my wife could keep track of things when selling her stuff at conventions.

I think one problem is that everyone wants something different. I've been contacted by people who run festivals that want very specific functionality. It is hard to build that while keeping a feature set that most other people would find useful.
As someone who has worked on the front end of a couple of .govs, dealing with 1 mid level IT manager is enough. Having them all "collaborate" is just more chaos. The culture of the agency (DOD vs HHS) can also be difficult to work with.
I think ORMs are "inherently stupid" (or: "quite likely to be leaky as abstractions") because they don't necessarily share a theory with the underlying databases ("something like but not exactly relational algebra") and I don't think many people spend time proving that the OO-like theories can be properly embedded into something-like-relational-algebra.

Not saying you can't get work done with them, but it does mean that they're likely to leak.
Not everybody programs against the C11 standard.
Federal side at OP's company (which OP is a member of) or in general?
I'm with you. It's best to run your own copies of the software on your own hardware (or VPS). People are depending more and more on services as a software substitute.

Furthermore, a lot of these free (gratis) applications can be replaced by free (libre) applications. That way you actually can run the software on your own machines.
I think curly braces are perfectly clear, to me the big problem with C-derived languages is the use of cryptic Boolean operators. The SQL-style "And", "Or" and "Not" Boolean operators are far more legible than "||", "&&" and the easy-to-miss "!".
There appears to be a negative correlation between the popularity of black metal and one's risk of premature death on a day to day basis.
Abstracting control flow is extremely powerful. Those interested in learning more should explore monads, which offer some very useful methods of generalizing and composing control flow abstractions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming)
For me at least I liked the concept of CoffeeScript, but had a couple issues with the implementation. I was originally very interested in it, but after experimenting with it for a little while decided not to use it as I felt it didn't really gain anything over using a particular style/subset of javascript itself.
This is close to my point.

When I see an article like this the first thing I do is click to see the "source". Often times it's another news org/blog article who cites another "source". Down the rabbit hole I go until I find the actual source which often times has had it's content mutated and taken out of context and/or spun to further the original author's point.

This isn't a "bloggers aren't journalists" rant. I don't care if you're a tiny no-name blogger or work for the Washington Post; your sources better be solid.
bcache should be faster, it's at a lower level, That said there are differences mainly the block size and distribution algorithm but could be easily 'fixed' given patches and benchmarks.
Yeah, comparing net worth is a terrible way of comparing wealth between individuals. Anyone who is fresh out of college with student loan debt, or who recently bought a house on a mortgage, has negative net worth.

If you're going to compare against collective net worth, then I personally have greater net worth than 25% of America, and the entire American federal government! Woo, I must be rich, right? Well, no, I've just paid off my student debt and don't have a mortgage. On the up side, I don't have any debt. On the down side, I don't have much in the way of equity, while some people with negative net worth have substantially more equity than I do, and if they, say, decided to sell their house and move to an apartment would suddenly have considerably more net worth than I do.

"Net worth" is not wealth. Measuring wealth is a somewhat difficult thing, but net worth is a fairly poor way of measuring it.
Medicare is more efficient than private insurers. of course it helps that it just says, F u, we're paying X, instead of making everyone jump through hoops and hoping they screw up and provide an excuse for denial, and Medicare doesn't need to market or grow profits.

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-ef...

sounds like this project is a colossal clusterf*k. Innovation and customer service are not in the government's wheelhouse, and I would certainly rather have market-based systems anywhere they work. It just hasn't worked for health care. And governments provide roads, schools, water etc. And the private sector has its share of disastrous projects, Webvan and Boo.com and Pets.com burning through hundreds of millions and going nowhere.

I sort of wish Google or Elon Musk or somebody would step up and volunteer to fix it, instead of saying, government sucks, people have to keep getting crappy/no health care.