skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of the wikitravel article on Azerbaijan:

Don't smile at an Azerbaijani in the street, because if you do they most likely will not respond in kind and they will regard you as odd. Smiling in Azerbaijan in public is not done and will be considered inappropriate. Smiling is traditionally reserved for family and friends; smiling at a stranger without addressing them, will be considered offensive, as they will either think that you are making fun of them and there is something wrong with their clothes or hair. Furthermore, an automatic "Western smile" (ie grinning) is widely regarded as insincere, as in "You don't really mean it". [1]

[1] http://wikitravel.org/en/Azerbaijan#Other_things_to_watch_fo...
> English words permeate almost all regional languages.

I wonder if, with the growing global connectedness due to the invention of the internet, we'll see a convergence of all spoken languages over the next hundreds or thousands of years.
Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally [youtube]
A Pakistani girl showed this video to me early this year, and she was in fact very moved.

The Pakistan - India divide is a tragedy of religion and politics, foreign and domestic.
Not for the people who would end up dying of Chagas because they can't afford medicine.
> As for why they'd funnel a lot of money into a controller that is nearly perfect- well, they have the money and they want to win. Isn't that enough explanation?

The problem with regards to Microsoft's R&D budget is that they're not winning. I don't have figures for this year, but last year Microsoft's R&D budget (as listed in their annual report) was $9.4 billion, compared to Google ($5.2 billion) and Apple ($2.6 billion).

One explanation is Microsoft simply account for R&D differently. Another explanation is that Microsoft overspend on R&D, or spend very poorly. Microsoft have always spent very highly on R&D, but over the past few years haven't had much to show for it in terms of growth or success.

I am sure there is some hyperbole and creative maths in the report to get to $100 million, but where you see Microsoft investing money to perfect the almost perfect, I see Microsoft spending far too much money on the wrong things.
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>You realise the slippery slope is also the name of a logical fallacy right?

You know that "logical fallacies" are BS that have nothing to do with Logic (formal logic and reasoning) and are wrong in thelselves besides, right?

>Where is the chain of events that connects them? that makes the argument a logically valid slippery slope as opposed to a fallacy?

It's called the "Overton Window". Check it out.

Oh, and the "chain of events connecting them" is the all increasing deployment of surveillance since the mid 20th century. An actual "slippery slope" in action, if I ever saw one.
Indian mathematics
What does Apple and Google have to do with Microsoft's console division?
This is absolutely fantastic. Really impressive work with the material itself.
There aren't that many /8s. You could just go through them all and see which one is "in Kansas City".
>>Do you think that the wife, who had spent the last n years raising eight children, had any skills that would get her a job bringing in enough money to keep both of them going?

You make it look like a profit-loss statement, in which its acceptable to walk out of a deal if its not profitable.

If that's the standard in a relationship, do you know the most dangerous part? Marriage doesn't make any sense for any man from that perspective. Marriage helps women more than it helps men. The man works all his life, like this guy worked 17 hr/day every day. Only to find when things get a little low, the wife will go to another man.

He might as well not get married, keep the money from his work for himself.
Current title: "MS Strikes Blow for Software Patents: Neuters Goodlatte Bill"

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why HN changes submission titles. Is MS really striking a blow for or against software patents? Or are we referring to software patent reform?

"Microsoft's Intense Lobbying Works: Goodlatte To Drop Plan To Allow For Faster Review Of Bad Software Patents" is the article title. That actually makes sense.
My argument would be the fact that it is "just a blogging platform."
From a practical perspective, Clojure is pretty close to Python in day to day usage. The largest difference to adapt to for me (and a couple others that I worked with), was the absence of the imperative-style for loop/yield keyword combination in Python. To get something similar, you tend to need to rewrite into something with lazy-seq/loop+recur. Everything else (for work doing web development, data processing, and internal API development) is pretty close with favorable points to each depending on the task.

If you were already writing pure functions in python and then creating data flows using generator expressions or list comprehensions, moving to Clojure is very natural. If you aren't, and if your job is to move bits from one place to another performing transformations along the way, you were already having issues in Python and might want to consider the approach regardless of the particular language employed.
NSA logged 33m calls in Norway in one month
The $100 million sounds slightly less impressive if you take it to mean controller R&D across the entire Xbox One project.

Let's assume that Microsoft started work on the console in 2007, two years after the Xbox 360 launched. Our $100 million has now become $16 million per year. Developing the controller is going to involve a lot of people: software, hardware, QA, design, supply chain, fabrication, etc.

Let's say that Microsoft has a team of a hundred people working on the controller (personally I think that's a very conservative guess). So of our $16 million we've easily eaten up half of that in labour costs. Prototyping, gearing and tooling up, and all the various other expenses associated with designing and manufacturing electronics eats the rest up pretty quickly.

This is obviously 'back of the napkin', hugely simplified conjecture, but I can definitely see how $100 million becomes a fairly reasonable figure over time.
Touching others (in whatever form) is different than "holding hands" in the way some cultures do. The difference is that there are hundrends of ways to touch someone, and thousand of circumstances where you do so. So any particular form is just one of many.

On the other hand, you carry your face and its' facial expression constantly, and your expression is the most basic form of interaction you have with another person socially, with talking as distant second. Furthermore, there are few expressions, are (almost?) all are universal, like smiling and crying.

Heck, you could live in the same room with a person for a month, with all kinds of normal interaction (eating, talking, etc) and never one touch him/her, and much less in any socially meaningful way (like holding hands or hugging). Not at all like avoiding having your face seen.
I looked through the site and peeked at the sample application. I am just posting to say, I like the concept of your application. Good luck!
Google "Companies ruined or almost ruined by Indians".
This would be the killer feature to add. Users should be able to communicate to freenode, and vice versa, while being able to do all of the management functions.
I'm attending DreamForce right now and I'm not surprised there isn't a lot of discussion.

SalesForce has reached a stage of maturity where they're focused less on innovation and more on capitalizing on all of their assets. Prior events focused on some form of evangelism, convincing people that the standard way of doing things was antiquated and a better option existed. Now, everybody is hip to what they're up to so there's less buzz.

DreamForce is just a brilliant marketing play now. Not much to see here that would be hackernewsworthy.
For what it's worth - the backlash is still kind of the case in the South (not speaking statistically, just from personal experience). I grew up around Mumbai and traveled to the southern part of the country 5 years ago where Hindi is not the native tongue.

Hindi was not particularly well-spoken nor was it always well-received by the other person. We wound up talking in English most of the time.
>I agree and it always appalls me how these sweeping-generalizations make it to the front page of HN.

Agree because it's somehow wrong? Just 2-3 comments below yours:

"I'm from Prague and I was always baffled by this. How does the smiling thing work? In what situations do you smile? For example, if you're walking on street, do you eye-contact people going in the opposite direction and smile at them?"
so useful! BIG like
Dhow Cruise Dinner in Dubai Creek A Most Influential Journey of Your Life
... and so the great Eye atop the Tower of Barad-dûr (i.e. the Federal Reserve) perceives and is curious. Tolerate a rival currency when its $ underpins the planet? Doubtful.
Replace first line with this to get rid of jaggies with "supersampling" :)

var w = 1000;c.style.width = '500px';
The Chinese are not acquiring USD and treasuries so that they can own spendable assets. They are doing so in order to push the value of their currency down, so that their export goods become more competitive.

This is done because while currency fluctuations and inflation can jump and fall hugely overnight, an industrial base takes DECADES to build up and decades to destroy. China is planning for the long term.

If there ever comes a point where the US industrial base has been effectively destroyed and China makes everything, they can stop the treasury buying and start cashing in. Inflation in the US will go NUTS and the US will have to build an industrial base from scratch -- starting essentially in China's position circa 1980. Not a happy place.

China will have lost trillions following this strategy, but the US will effectively stop being a strategic or military threat if it is followed through to its logical conclusion.

Bitcoin is not a godsend to the Chinese government, as it creates a means to let capital exit the country (which they are desperately trying to prevent).
I understand why your call for discretion sounds like a good idea, but the only conceivable implementation will be cops (either those cops themselves, or other employees of the police force) deciding which stuff is irrelevant personal stuff and which stuff is public record. And there's no reasons to believe that discussion of their own misconduct would ever make it to the public record.
This is great!

I think switching to Github would increase the rate of contributions significantly though.
Reading comments in this thread just confirms the old saying that it's easy to be a good general after the battle. But David himself says at the beginning of the text: "I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation."

Of course it's easy to analyze what went wrong after the fact. But it's not easy to see the trends when you're amid them. (Continuously monitoring the ongoing trends is one of the advices in the Book of five rings. A pile of small seemingly incremental changes amounts to a big shift. It's hard to notice them when they happen over an extended period of time.)
Better would be if someone discuss how we can bring up http://extendedsubset.com ;)
Applying to startups, chuck your resume
What would you want to see in such a tutorial? A lot goes into even the most barebones functional operating systems.
'there were far more Tamil'

That is false. Citations please?

'and Bengali speakers'

This ignores the fact that Bengali attained its status because of British who ruled India from Calcutta and enabled Bengali hegemony. No native speakers learned Bengali as second language in rest of the undivided India. Only Bengali diaspora moved to different parts of country as part of British civil services.

'Hindi... was given a formal status of national language by the predominantly Northern Indian Congress government post-independence to use it as an instrument to exert central political influence on the rest of the country'

Another propaganda. Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) was the most spoken and widely understood language in undivided India. Hindustani was official language of British. It might lose to Bengali IFF one divides it into Hindi and Urdu. But that division happened AFTER independence, when the spoken Hindi was standardized to a Sanskrit base, and Arabic-Persian words were mercilessly pruned-off to enable non-Hindustani speaking people to grasp it easily. The only people who got the short end of the deal were Tamil, because Tamil language has got almost (almost) nothing to do with Sanskrit.

To blame a newly formed government of an enslaved country, of 'exerting political influence' is the racist tirade Tamils latched on to, after there beloved masters left the country and didn't leave them in charge.
>>I'd much rather sit in the library and read books.

Unlikely.

Have you ever been seriously ill, and nothing that doctors seem to do is working? Have you been in a super shitty situation with massive amounts on uncertainty surrounding it?

The problem is people are so eager, and their energies are so much more spent in worry and anxiousness that stuff like 'book reading project' will be least of their priorities. All the time its like- Will this cure help? Can I get a job here? Can I move to somewhere cheaper?

From his perspective the priorities would have been, finding information or some lead or a job posting that can get him his next meal, a place to live, a long term solution to his problems.

A book reading project? People can't focus on reading a news paper correctly when are tensed and anxious. Such things are for the time of peace.
>Does the citizenry have the same level of access to negotiating parts of the TPP as the lobby groups who paid admission?

If they wanted it, yes.
Getting Started With a Standing Desk
I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but Firefox keyword searches let you bookmark any website's search page and then invoke it from the address bar with a keyword:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches

For example, if you bookmark "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s" with a keyword of "w", then enter "w whatever" will directly load "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=whatever".
Programming is primarily a social endeavor
What's wrong with being alone in pushing an issue? Is this middle school?
also, 10 days is a massive amount of time for bitcoin. It doesn't take much to say "the price will go down a bit some time in the next 10 days".
MF Global...
I'm assuming new favors are checked for quality before being lined up in the queue, right?
You must be kidding.

Let alone taking a 2 year break. If you are not having side projects which you work after office hours, late night and weekends.

If you are not learning quickly, adapting or improving your skills fast enough. You are setting yourself up for disaster.
Official releasing what appears to be original court file authorizing NSA sweeps
> I think people hear "rewrites history" and let their imaginations run wild with sci-fi tales of wonder, only then to think of the grave horrors such power would enable... but forget to look at what actually is happening when you "rewrite history" in git. There is no reason to fear it.

Yeah, I very much agree with this. Rewriting history is a tool, a very powerful tool. It's something you can use if you want to.

It reminds me a little of a discussion I had recently with a developer who mostly used statically typed languages. I'm using to dynamically typed languages like Python and JavaScript, so it was puzzling for me to hear him talk about the horrors of dynamic types. He said things like "I pass a Person object to a function and the function might do anything with it -- like adding new methods and fields to it!". Yes, it is true that you can add a new method to an object in most dynamically typed languages. No, adding methods and fields by accident is not really a problem in real life.

Just because you have the option of doing something, doesn't mean that you must do it.
>Do you think that the life, as envisioned by children, who want to eat only ice cream when they grow up, includes scurvy, diabetes and other effects of such a diet?

Do you think that people are automata, and any attempt to build a system with X attributes necesarrily also has Y attributes, in the automatic way that eating only sugar leads to diabetes?

Just because there was an attempt to build X (socialism for example), under specific circumstances (e.g less technologically and politically advanced countries such as Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia), under specific forces (20th century colonialism, WWII, cold war etc), and with specific people at the helm influencing things all around (Stalin and Mao basically), doesn't mean any attempt to build X in different circumstance will end up the same.
Out of all the "big" tech companies, Mozilla is really the only one I've ever wanted to work for!
uh
groovy is a clusterfuck for cats who learn about closures on the corner, hanging out with brendan eich or somesuch. gradle does seem like a nice buold system. regardless, java is some sort of cosmonaut condom, worth using mostly for the big software written in it behind a firewall of jvm free physical hardware.
Jython is Python on Java, in Java.
I think the husband is smart enough to filter the cards.
Indian army and RAW are nowhere influential enough to be compared to Pak-army and ISI. India has done one good thing in establishing democracy - its political has curbed the military power from day 1 of independence. Unfortunately it is the opposite in Pakistan.
Bitcoin Regulation Required??
There was a news magazine article from the early 90s on how China was building highways yet no one had cars (besides the military and government). Every project starts empty, it's the next 25-50 years that count.
Google's done several commercials, well before any of the recent furor. One of the first was "Parisian Love" which aired during the Superbowl in 2010. The more memorable one was "Dear Sophie" in 2011 which got a lot more coverage, and I believed that aired in the US as well. I'm not as cynical as you are about Google's motives here, but i would think that airing ads in the US would have far more of an impact on the US public and regulators than a foreign language ad in India.

Parisian Love: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
Dear Sophie Lee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk
That's a good point about him potentially wanting to save face for his kids. However, I don't want to speculate on what his thinking was. I don't know what his thinking was, and don't have enough information to infer what it was.

My point is only that IF he was doing it to save face for himself, that it's a stupid decision. His pride is less important than his well being (in terms of his happiness, his chances of bouncing back, his family and friends' happiness etc.).

Regarding my use of the word "stupid", I stand by it. I don't mean to be contentious at all. And I don't mean that he is a stupid person. I just mean that that decision is a stupid one (IF he in fact made it).

As far as stupid vs. foolish vs. irrational goes, I don't understand the meanings and connotations of these words well enough to really say, but I get the sense that 'stupid' does a better job of "calling someone out" and emphasizing the fact that a bad decision was made. I think these tasks needed to be accomplished, and so I think 'stupid' was the right word.
Hello world in 1 line of javascript
Dude, pure awesomeness
Given all the comments about Google and Wikipedia, it's funny how you forgot to lookup Hindi. It is in fact an official language of India. Please gets your facts right.
Impressive not only from a "ooo-that's-clever" perspective, but it's also readable, tweakable code. Many of these tiny JS toys aren't things you can really do anything with; this example is a great basis for learning.
To be fair, it's not exactly a "raytracer", it's a program capable of rendering that specific scene (i.e. bunch of spheres) using a recursive raytracing algorithm, which isn't awfully complex in itself. Not trying to say it's bad or anything, just want to point out that it's not very surprising for something like this to be under 100 loc in a high-level language.
I like that it has a physical keyboard, what I can't stand is the resistive touchscreen.

Back in the day, I would have totally gotten an n900 if it weren't for the screen (I tried it, just didn't work for me.)
Hm... that makes me wonder what the key motivation for them to accept so low a level of expected economic reward would be... any insight?
Recognize romantic partner using FB network [Oct, 2013]
This was with a fresh incognito session, so theoretically there shouldn't be a cookie.

A bit more trial & error shows that its possibly connected via IP...switching IP seems to confuse it.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography in Practice
Nothing. But this is HN.
I think the meat is here: https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs-nginx/tree/master/con...
This is very cool. Interestingly it was generated by Google's Closure compiler. The author has the full source with excellent comments on his site.

link: http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/tiny_raytracer.html
The intent behind Luminus is that it's training wheels, but you're still using the "real" tools you'll use when you're making your own services. It's a way to teach people patterns without needing to reify them into a rigid and unnecessary framework.
>For example, if you're walking on street, do you eye-contact people going in the opposite direction and smile at them?

At least in the States, yes. It's how you show you're not about to go for their throat with a knife.
I doubt it is fully open phone. At least soft, that works on baseband processor probably closed. More about this problem: https://laforge.gnumonks.org/papers/gsm_phone-anatomy-latest...
The true of Darwinism in general -- some of the same people who claim to be Christian believe in social Darwinism and survival of the fittest as they apply it to the poor and struggling.

I read a couple of Gould's book many years ago and they were always very entertaining and informative.
Gmail introduces ads in the form of emails 
I checked my inbox this morning and I noticed this under the Promotions tab. Native ads in the form of emails in Gmail.

1) http://i.imgur.com/1HrzZhs.png

2) http://i.imgur.com/klmxqwp.png

Good or bad? What do you think?
from his site:

> Their combination of a simple algorithm and stunning results are hard to beat.

that's exactly what fascinates me about raytracing. It's pretty straightforward, you literally emulate the light bouncing around, but given enough resources the results can be surprisingly good-looking.