skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can imagine many people wiull get overly creative with there profile pictures.

But in fairness the choice is by default disabled so you would have to enable it - as it stands today.
Steve Eisman, eat your heart out. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-24/big-short-eisman-vi...
What is your point? Apocryphon lists a couple of counterexamples to the author's notions of the so-called "Anglosphere". You provide counterexamples to a notion of a Portuguese-sphere. Are you agreeing that all of this, starting with the author's article, is rubbish?
You are misinterpreting 'obscurity' to as much of a degree as the grandparent post, though in a different way. The 'obscurity' that the adage speaks of is meant to relae to the system you're using. ROT13 is security through obscurity: as soon as your adversary knows you're using it, your system is broken. RSA is not security through obscurity: you can advertise that you use it (indeed, that's fundamentally a part of public key crypto), and still be safe.
great read, thank you
I came to similar conclusions but didn't like Scrivener, so I scratched my own itch instead. The result is http://dreamwriterapp.com - it only works in Chrome, but it can handle 100,000+ word novels without performance tanking like it does in Google Docs.
Hangul is great, but don't try to use it for English. Try writing "Larry really loves the zoo very much". You get "Raeri ri-a-ri reo-beu-seu da joo bae-ri meo-chi".

In other words, you lose the L/R and V/B differences, and words like "much" can't end on consonants, so you get "Muchi".

Hangul has no sounds corresponding to "V, F, R-L, Th, and 'woo'".
With most of the mid-to-high level legacy languages (COBOL, C++, Fortran) getting more down votes than up, I'm pleasantly surprised to see Ada stay in positive territory.
Google Is Going to Include Your Face in Its New Ads
Anyone compiling a list of talking points for why s-expressions aren't so crazy after all, should add this to the list. (Just append it to the list, no comma required; i.e. pun sorta intended.)
Long have I said, " Word processors are to words as food processors are to food,"

The root of the trouble is that word processors intermingle the tasks of writing and the task of formatting. This might be fine for the odd office memo, but is ill suited to almost anything else.

That said, word processors are nothing compared to the hell that is writing comments on a touch screen with a predictive text algorithm that refuses to swear!
No, this is not the community I have loved and been a part of for 8 years. This kind of behaviour - assault, companies covering up the matter, bullying - is NOT acceptable!

I will stand up, all 445 pounds of me, to anyone who thinks this matter should just go away. We need to talk about this, and minds need to be changed so that our community will improve.
My heart goes out to Justine and her courage to talk publicly about this. We are all in her debt.
VCs as a group move as a herd just like every other class of investors. Enterprise startups performed very poorly between 2000 and 2008 (in large part because enterprises all but stopped buying new technology from new companies) and so they went badly out of fashion. This naturally created a shortage of innovation in important categories which started to get rectified by a new wave of enterprise startups starting about then, and then those startups collectively have performed very well financially including as IPOs, which now has VCs as a group all lathered up for enterprise startups.

We like to think that we are observing this phenomenon but still differentiated enough in our thinking and our network that we can pick a new set of winners now. Time will tell if we are right or if we are just part of the herd :-).
My life and my consciousness is a continuous, ongoing, self-sustaining process. If you make a copy of me, that is a different instance of that process.

An analogy can be made between two instances of a program running on a computer, or two instances of a particular class in OO programming.

Ultimately, all of my values reduce to physical pain and pleasure and the anticipation of my continued and increasing ability to experience more pleasure than pain. Sure, I have lots of higher-level, "spiritual" values, but the underlying biological process is what makes those possible. I have no biological or higher-level (rational) reason to care about a different instance of my body and consciousness. I only care about this one.

When I go to sleep, I am putting my conscious mental life on hold, but not my physical life. And I know that my concsiousness will resume in a few hours when I wake up. So making a copy of yourself and killing the original is not obviously analogous to sleeping.
Maybe something like this? https://github.com/yogthos/Selmer
> It technologically impossible/impractical to have a separate SSL cert for each user, that is just not how the HTTPS protocall was designed

Not impossible; each paying user[0] could be granted their own subdomain based on username and then an SSL cert issued specific to that domain.

What really stands out from reading the unsealed documents is that there was no separation of data and control within Lavabit; Mr Levison argues at one point that handing-over the SSL certs will also expose his administrative commands. Well, tough. Control and data should never flow in the same channel, particularly when handling data for which you have already received and processed warrants in the past.

[0] there were only 10,000 users paying for the high-security service. The other 400,000 were on the standard offering, without at-rest encryption.
According to the story, the other person involved was allowed to leave the company, saying it was his own decision. Nobody forced him to blog about it. He, however, chose to take the topic of his leaving the company public, in a way that one can easily see would sound like derision to somebody who was a victim of assault: http://objo.com/2013/01/31/funemployment/

So now it's internet mob behaviour if she posts her side of the story?
Exactly.

This has no bearing again whatsoever on what the government can subpoena. Just because it "sucks" that you've designed your system that if the feds need access to one account you've configured it such that one must grant access to everyones account when you have to comply is par for the course.

You could say that the blame for Lavabit being shuttered is actually due to the technical design of the site and the compromises made for connivence. You should blame the site creator for that, not the USG for exploiting it.
The WA state one is full of XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities. It's quite beautiful.
Benchmarking Integer Compression in Go
Well, every person / company of considerable means practices "tax avoidance," which basically means legal structuring of activities in such a way that they produce fewer tax obligations.

For example, waiting over a year to sell stocks so you pay long term rather than short term capital gains.

This is contrasted by "tax evasion," which is the illegal version of the same thing.

I know you're going to say, what Google is doing here is obviously wrong, not the same thing at all; and you're right, but a court has to draw the line somewhere, and it's very, very difficult to do so. Google has a variety of extremely highly paid professionals telling them they are on the correct side of that line, and so does every other large company, which is why so many of them employ these strategies.

In fact, I wonder how much more "moral" they could get without incurring legal action from shareholders over not taking advantage of permissible methods of tax avoidance!
>> being poor is a very bad business policy

> I contend the reverse is more often the case: bad [personal] business policy is a primary (though not exclusive) cause of poverty.

Yes, I agree actually -- I was being a bit ironic in my original post. There's plenty of personal responsibility in poverty, at least in Western, democratic countries. People could take a number of constructive steps to better themselves, like shred their credit cards, don't fall for some of the more obvious economic traps like borrowing money for unnecessary possessions, thinks like that.

And I also completely agree with your other point -- that understanding how money works is critical.
You might thing that unit test as a language feature is weird. But our experience with it is that minor-seeming weird feature has been an enormous success.

It has literally transformed writing D code, and for the better. There's another little feature, -cov, which will tell you which lines of code are covered by the unit tests.

It's hard to understate the improvement these engender.
Almost as interesting is Hangul keyboard layout:

http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/02/26/hangul-keyboard-la...

It is logical yet efficient. If you know Korean, you should be able to learn to touch type Hangul with just a few hours of practice as I had to about a decade ago. Even on iPhone, I found the layout easier to peck on.
LibreOffice is fighting the good fight and for most things it's a great substitute for word.

But I've always wondered what would happen if something like Latex were to become truly user friendly - I mean pre-compiled distributions that are easy to download and work without tweaking, relatively good wysiwyg viewers and a less obtuse maze of packages.
I didn't think it was either, but the reaction of many makes me truly doubt it. :(

Thank you.
The goal of a contractor is to extract as much money as possible from their client, not necissarily to do efficient quality work. In some cases it makes sense for a contractor to do quality efficient work, meaning that is the best path to profits, and sometimes it is not.
Just spin up a flask instance on a server to handle the logic. No vendor lock-in, and it shouldn't take more than an hour.
> It makes sense from the publishers point of view to pick one format and stick with it, so they have a consistent editing style [...]

One problem with Word is exactly that it is very difficult to get anything remotely consistent out of it. Even people who are very knowledgeable and smart are unable to use that hodgepodge of completely intransparent styling features correctly. Anything involving numbering and bullets tends to be broken as well.

There's no way a publisher gets a consistently styled document from an author. I don't believe that for a second. I'm absolutely certain that publishers have an army of interns who fix the jumbled mess they're receiving from authors.
One thing we can all do:

Start asking before you touch in situations where you know you don't have to.

I know it's awkward. But the reason people like Joe think they can put their hands down someone's pants is because we don't have a cultural practice of "ask first". They see you put your arms around that friend of yours who doesn't mind at all, and they think "Ah, cool... so you can just sense if she's cool with it and then go for it".

Of course you're not a scumbag, so you'd never put your hands down someone's pants without asking, but that's the thing... scumbags can't tell the difference. They don't see the difference between you rubbing your friend's back because she's having a bad day--your friend who is happy to have a little contact from you--they don't see the difference between that and them taking a body shot off of their employee without asking. In both cases they just see someone making their best guess at what someone else wants, without asking, and going for it. That's the cultural standard, that's your standard, so that's what they hold themselves to.

Basically, right now we try to draw the line between ask/don't ask as close to the ok/not ok line as we possibly can. But in a world where people make mistakes that means there are lots of "accidents". The only way to prevent those accidents is to move the ask/don't ask line further into "ok" territory.

Sexual assault might seem like an issue between individuals, but as long as we see it that way it will continue happening. If we're serious about changing it, it's something we have to collectively take responsibility for.

If hundreds of times a week these people see the rest of us asking our wives, asking our friends, asking everyone "do you want a backrub?" and "can I kiss you?" and "is this ok?" then their expectations change. They'll start to feel weird not asking. And maybe some of these assaults can turn into near-assaults.
Yes, there are several. I mentioned two in my post above, so it's unfair of you to say that all I did was make accusations of isms. Here they are, repeated:

1. The fact that the (very large) number of Indian soldiers in WW2 was slipped in without comment into a statement about how NZ, Australia and other Anglosphere countries were joined in some kind of glorious kinship. India was not, and is not, a part of this cosy club and should not have been in that list.

2. Attributing the participation of Indian soldiers in WW2 to some kind of personal decision, and not the fact the British ruled India at the time as an imperialist foreign power.

Here are a couple more statements that are false:

1. "What do we mean by Western civilization?...Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us."

This was patently false in the large parts of the world where Britain ruled illegally for two centuries. Taxes were routinely levied on citizens of the colonies without representative government. (I seem to remember this having something to do with the American Revolution, as a matter of fact.)

2. "Yet Peru—indeed, Latin America in general—never achieved the law-based civil society that North America takes for granted. Settled at around the same time, the two great landmasses of the New World serve almost as a controlled experiment. The north was settled by English-speakers, who took with them a belief in property rights, personal liberty, and representative government. The south was settled by Iberians who replicated vast estates and quasi-feudal society of their home provinces."

There were several other differences between North and South America, including the climate, the relative times at which they achieved independence, and (perhaps most importantly) the attitudes of the imperialists towards their subjects. In colonies where the ruled were racially different than the rulers (South America, Africa and Asia), their treatment and eventual outcomes were far worse than in places where the colonial power and the colonies were both racially the same (North America). The author is ignorant at best, and probably deliberately dishonest, in not mentioning this as part of his argument.

==============

The tone of the article is clear enough that point by point rebuttals like this are a waste of time, but since you asked...
> Arguments raged internally: should it use control codes, or hierarchical style sheets? In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there.

Replace "Word" with "HTML". Now is it still the abominable dichotomy the OP is claiming?

Although I think Word sucks in many ways, letting users combine style sheet and local formatting doesn't seem like the Original Sin from which all evil flowed.
if i were the supreme dictator of the world, i would replace currency as a form of exchange, and use Joules as a form of exchange, and then mandate that all energy production be distributed equally to every single living human. E.g., lets assume 30 petawatthours of energy per year(approx 108 000 peta joules), divided by 6 billion people, is approx 18000000000 joules per year, or approx 50 million joules per day for each person.

To pay for food, you "pay" the amount of joules it takes to fuel the robots that create your food. Ditto with any automatable production (clothing, houseing), and any land has a tax equivalent of the amount of solar energy extractable from the land.

You could attempt to save your joule allocation, but i suspect it will become too difficult. You cannot borrow joules the way you can borrow money (that is, the "bank" cannot be a fractional reserve system). But you would be encouraged to invest your joule allocation into useful endeavours, such as scientific research, which is always made available to all to use.

You can get richer by investing in improvements, and get richer by growing the size of the pie. There would be no way to get richer at the expense of making someone else's allocation lower.
I suspect that the author may have just looked up the entry for the word on Wikipedia. I was surprised that Stephenson had been the one to coin the term; I'm still wondering if that's an accurate claim or not.
I haven't been to a programming conference before, and I always assumed it was kinda prudish of the people who said that the atmosphere at such events should be toned down. They reminded me of the people on my freshman hall who would give me dirty glances when I stumbled in late and tipsy: who are you to tell me what's wrong?

What's the harm? I like whiskey. It's tasty, and makes me more sociable.

Now I get it. I'm not saying that's the main takeaway from this article, but a norm dictating that industry conferences should have an average BAC higher than half of my college parties is never going to help the situation.
Congratulations for open sourcing the library. Do you think, it could generate a title as a one sentence summarization?
I can't go into so much detail about it, but some companies I had to deal with had a form that was MS Word. ("More than 50 pages of check list" which used one of those fields, in which I had to check mark each one of them.)

They had MS Word and PDF version of it, which PDF version wasn't even fillable form. Somehow those forms are a real pain to work with. One time, I just printed out the entire thing out of the PDF and just hand-checked them, and another time, I've used Preview app on Mac to check those by annotation. Either way, they were very annoying...
Freedom? When I go to North America I don't see native Indians, most of them were exterminated in order to steal their land. Is that freedom?

You will find even disrespect to what they call "Hispanic people" that in fact are more native American that they are, from California to New Mexico or Florida.Those were not exterminated because they were lately incorporated from other countries.

In all the south you find lots of blacks living in misery, the descendants of slaves. Is that freedom? In Spain slavery was forbidden by law in XVI century. In practice there were abuses but by law any native Indian was a citizen like any other.

When you go to any Latin American country you find a significant population of native Indians, all of them somewhat different from another. It is not the same the people from Colombia to the people in Ecuador, Brazil, or Argentina. This difference makes hard for them to unite and became a US competitor. Also US has done anything he could to divide and conquer, including destroying by force those governments that did not align with US interest.

In the past it was Europe who controlled South America, now it is the US. Brazil is slowly getting independent, as it is big enough.

Don't get me wrong, I like the US and have lots of north American friends, but there is propaganda in any country of this world and people inside them believe it blind folded without thinking for themselves.
As nl mentioned below, I thought it was obvious that this was in response to the list of countries in the article -- NZ, Australia, South Africa and so on. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I think a much more workable solution would be to collectively attempt to abandon the shitty American brand of alcohol culture that seems to be a fairly common contributing factor in a lot of these stories about rape and assault.

Alcohol makes one stupid, not cool. I have no idea why it is held in such high esteem in the US tech industry.
Hate the Sin, Blame the Victim
Most assuredly some will, that's to be expected. If given a similar option I'd mothball my career over the course of six months and spend $n years engaging in unprofitable creative pursuits and maybe travel.
(about stylesheets and codes) "Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there."

No. That's the "developers" point of view (and a false dichotomy)

Word is focused on the user. If the user wants to italicise one letter, it's OK to let him do it. Sometimes it's a requirement

Of course, the problem with Word is that you can't debug the mess it creates when it doesn't work the way you wanted.
Hell, George R.R. Martin uses WordStar 4.0 in DOS. You don't need anything fancy to put chars in a text file.
Awesome idea... trending URLs on social networks
Justine, you are a courageous woman. Thank you for sharing this.
I switched to NeoOffice several years ago and currently use LibreOffice. Wrote my dissertation on it. And this despite having access to MS-Office for free through a university license.
The Functional Database [video]
Do you know what the effective tax rates were during those years? There was no "alternative minimum tax" to limit the abuse of deductions, which I believe hearing were rampant.

(This isn't to say you are wrong, at all; just that the actual tax businesses are really required to pay must be considered, not the claimed values on the sticker sheet.)
Wow, what was I thinking. You definitely should never, ever, report crimes to the police.

Especially if there were two witness bar staff!
My guess is that it's closely related to the collegiate alcohol culture, which is just as shitty and pretty much ubiquitous, and which many younger devs were a part of before graduating into industry.
Ah, this is me being misleading, I didn't mean the styling of the document was important(well, until it gets sent to publication, where I am sure you're right about the interns), I really meant the ability and tools to edit/review/track changes and highlight/annotate sections they want changed.
“The reason I want Word to die is that until it does, it is unavoidable.” I don't know what he would think about air with this hipster mentality.
> Look at what a dishonest shitfest the political system is in India, and the whole culture of corruption.

> It seems likely that without the British having brought "Anglo civilization", India today would be like most of Africa today.

India was keeping pace with the rest of world, and leading in many ways, quite nicely for thousands of years before the 1600s. It happened to be under continuous foreign occupation at just the time the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe, and British policies were explicitly designed to stifle the same changes happening in India. Most things that you see today are a consequence of that missed opportunity.

Without the British, it's more likely that India would have been like Japan today rather than Africa.

It's easy to be thankful for British influence when the US got rid of it so early in the industrialization game.