skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If people are not familiar with L-systems, wiki is a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

Besides their inherent interest in modeling biological systems, people here might be interested in them as an example of a stochastic grammar, i.e., a system of rewriting rules where multiple branches can be taken with various probabilities. L-systems are not necessarily probabilistic, but in applications, probabilistic ones are often used.
Can you post your ,v file somewhere? I'd like to try to replicate your experiment, using my rcs(1) and cvs(1).

While I'm impressed that your Python script is quick, I'm not sure that Python is ever "small" compared to any POSIX-like UNIX userland utility. An accurate perspective of the size of any "Python implementation" would account for (a) all the files you need to install on top of a POSIX-like UNIX userland in order to get Python to run and to run your script and (b) the fact that the OS Torvalds would have used if not for the AT&T lawsuit, namely BSD, does not include Python in the base install. If Python were truly "small", I'd consider it for use in embedded systems.
If you have any experience with Ruby on Rails and jQuery please email me at Amar@Zenmaid.com
> Given that it uses reflect I bet your library very slow.

Look carefully - what I wrote is not a library; it's a standalone binary. It's run exactly once, when you write the code, so speed isn't an issue.

> That's not a small issue.

Depends on the language. In Go, it's very easy to allow a JSON value to be null and/or undefined by making the value it unmarshals to a pointer (which you should be doing already anyway).

What's harder (in most languages, not just Go) is dealing with a value that could be (say) either a string, or a 64-bit int. Or, worse, a string whose value just happens to be a 64-bit number. When that happens (which is thankfully rare), it breaks the "JSON should be self-documenting" motto.

> So the JSON you get back can be very different then you might expect otherwise.

This is an issue no matter what language you use. You have to know what the set of possible response structures is in order to know what keys to query/access.
Sounds similar to the premise of the 1983 comedy film Trading Places (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086465).
Plato is an amazing resource.

Its articles strike the perfect balance between intellectual rigour and general accessibility. It combines the traditional encyclopedic format with the authorship of academic experts. And if that wasn't enticing enough, the articles are published for free and list the author's contact information at the bottom.
Yeah... Pavlina shutting down his forums coincided with him finding out that a few of the regular members of his forum had been starting another forum/online community. He felt that this was a betrayal, because it was "behind his back", although there were no allegiance to his online community. This new community was something of an invite-only thing, which someone felt was elitism, but which seemed more like a clique thing (though some people felt bad about not being invited). There were definitely cliques on those forums, particularly among many of the most frequent posters.

I viewed Pavlina's thought process in the wake of this "incident" (there was a lot of drama about him nuking the forums) as very.. after-the-fact rationalizing-ly. In his mind, this was a very calculated decision, something which had been building up to for years, and not just something that had been slightly gnawing at him and then suddenly breaking the camel's back because of one jealous fit over someone deciding to create a more tight-knit community (which he wasn't invited to...? I don't remember). Well that's just my impression of the whole thing.
The authorities view hackers as modern day witches, something to be feared and destroyed.

The story our of our era is the third option: co-opted.
http://disqus.com/humans.txt
Because anything that requires running a database is burdensome, and even those of us who roll our own services are becoming less patient with software that requires hand-holding just to walk.
What is "the irony"?
Thanks for this. Dire looks like a fantastic addition to the Clojure eco-system!
Spike Lee responds to 'stolen' poster designer
Imagine how ridiculous the web would look today if content creators had to restrict the images they used to some common subset of those preinstalled on clients' operating systems.

Would you condemn web typography to the use of "web safe fonts" forever?
The Currencies of Tomorrow
Is there some movie that's source of the cliche of needing to defuse a bomb by cutting the wire with the right color? This is so common a cliche that it must have come from somewhere.

And while I'm asking random questions, where did the cliche of the anarchist with the spherical black bomb with a fuse coming out the top come from? This icon was used for system errors on the original Mac, but it must be way older than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(symbol)
Looks like Spike Lee has just made the mother of all hypocritical "its OK to pirate my movie" responses:

“Why Should I Pay Someone Who I Never Met Nor Had Any Contact With Ever? He Never Made Any Deal With Me. Why Don’t You Pay Me For Your Stupid Text On Thanksgiving Day?”
I would love a make work program that paid people at least subsistence.
Louis: Looking good, Billy Ray!
Billy Ray: Feeling good, Louis!
I'm a proficient keyboard (piano, analogue synth, workstation) and woodwind player (and not quite as proficient programmer). Can someone sell this to me as to be honest I have no idea what it does or where I could stick it in my workflow?
How Whites Took Over America Part 2
Your claim is the exact opposite of what he wrote. Do you have any evidence?
Well, I'm not and no one should be "coping" (with being in their 30's!), and it's not a "decline". It's only a decline if you look at the downside and not the upside.

I totally agree that you have more raw energy and there is more potential for excitement when you're 14. But like I said, if you want to write good software, "energy" and "excitement" are not top on the list of attributes you need.

I think the OP is basically describing mild depression, which is a completely different issue, unrelated to getting older. You can be depressed and young or depressed and old. In fact I was a lot more depressed when I was younger.

You turned an issue of motivation into an issue of age, when they're not the same thing.

Perhaps if your goal is to write the next Facebook, and you're in your 30's, the time has passed. You're not going to be Zuckerberg, or Larry Page. I guess some people have trouble coming to grips with that. But personally I don't care so much about those kinds of things (and didn't when I was younger either.) You're not going to be Van Halen or Jack White either. Suck it up :)
Twist: Pauper guy is Satoshi.
Thank you! This is actually for my prior startup (probably too profitable to call a "startup" at this point, actually), http://www.futurescaper.com/. But Podaris is shaping up to be HTML5/JS from top to bottom as well. Unlike Futurescaper, it doesn't need a smartphone incarnation, and the alpha version works surprisingly well on tablets, pretty much out of the box.

No Elon Musk involvement. Yet. :-)
I'm using Chrome on OSX and the color value was highlighted red in the source, so I immediately looked at that.
This is an interesting news story about one case of a "natural experiment" on human beings that would be quite unethical to perform on a large scale. The study of twins reared apart, which was especially active at my alma mater university while I was a student there,[1] took advantage of some other happenstance separations of monozygotic ("identical") twins into more than one family of upbringing to see what effects of home environment on genetically identical young people as they grow up might be.

For behavior genetic studies on fruit flies, direct gene manipulation is considered ethical, and quite harsh environmental tests, tests that would never be considered ethical for mice, are also used. For mice, they can be bred into inbred strains in which every individual for generation after generation is all but identical, and can also be given gene "knockouts" through genetic engineering technology, and the environments can be varied by systematic controlled experiments rather than the haphazardly varying experiences of human beings.

I discuss issues related to this research every week during the school year at my alma mater university with some of the world's leading experts on human behavior genetics.[2] This is a fascinating area of research, and there is always more to learn. Some of the more puzzling questions will probably only get answers as more researchers from varied postgraduate educational background collaborate on conducting continued research.

[1] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055469

[2] http://www.psych.umn.edu/research/areas/pib/
Time for more European countries to facilitate entrepreneur visas
There, copied one for you, so you don't have to waste 2 seconds giving a pageview to that pesky website: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/18558591/
Bitcoins worth $9M buried in garbage dump
The spoke has been cut (by design) and the shaft passer sits at the cut, where the shaft passes through it. It cleverly does this "airlock-like" without falling apart and letting the two halves of the spoke separate. Similarly, the topoisomerase, after cutting the "spoke" DNA, becomes covalently bound to each side of the cut. Then the "shaft" DNA passes through the topoisomerase, without the topoisomerase falling apart or letting the two sides of the "spoke" DNA drift apart. Multiple "shaft" strands can pass before the "spoke" strand is religated and the enzyme detaches. So I think the principle is quite analogous.
How the hell did you become aware of their comment and write such an excellent reply in under 45min?

You're awesome.
But technically, the GPL - and in particular those terms - don't apply to the licenser/copyright holder, only to the licensee.

So when the GPLv2 says that "You may not impose...", that only applies to someone who is re-distributing the work, not to the original distributer.

The GPLv3 is different, due to section 7, since the licenser can't remove that line (the GPL itself is not Free to modify).
Mmmmm. Steak.
There add numerous Sci-Fi novels and short stories that this pops up in. One I can think of off the top of my head is The Giver where children are carried by women who have that job and are then assigned to a family unit.
It is amusing to see them try to shoehorn "Continental" works into "Analytic" categories. The idea, for instance, that _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ is a text about ethics in the same vein as _After Virtue_ borders on the absurd.
People would rebel with tremendous violence against it. Either you would have a total revolution, or a dual system, where the elites had a separate set of rules for themselves. Probably the latter.
This reminds me of an episode of Curb'd where Larry David is under the impression that he was switched at birth and isn't really Jewish.

This made him giddy and broke imaginary bonds that were the source of his real personal flaws. It was hilarious.
Alderney looks to cash in on virtual Bitcoins with Royal Mint reality
I don't suppose anyone knows if there is any ethical review required for experiments on fruit flies?

And, follow up question, at what level (higher or lower than fruit flies) are experimenters allowed to proceed experimenting on life forms without an ethics review.
He's the original poster of the article, in case you didn't notice. I'm sure that

a) He was expecting a comment like that, as evidenced by the "Oh boy, one of these" comment, and prepared to respond to it, and

b) He was watching for new comments on the submission.
> This is the wrong idea of what an encrypted and secure social network should be. Networks need to be moving away from this centralized model into a system of routed nodes for a secure, encrypted peer-to-peer system.

There are many people working on this problem from many different angles. The logical first step for us was to create a zero-knowledge public key infrastructure that decentralizes trust. This system doesn't preclude decentralization of data, which is another problem in itself, and it's something we're working on. The Cryptosphere project (https://github.com/cryptosphere/cryptosphere) has some really neat ideas that need to be discussed more widely.

We have to keep in mind, though, that decentralization of data is not always practical in terms of large-scale adoption and accessibility. It’s one of the reasons why Diaspora didn’t go as far as it could have, IMO.

> It's not open either, which is arguably even worse than having a central system in the first place.

We’re progressively releasing our code on Github and plan on being fully open in the near future. If you haven’t already, you can check out our white paper and some of our repositories at https://github.com/symeapp.

> while the content itself is encrypted, the "metadata" still isn't, which renders everything moot anyway. Timestamped messages are still too much information to be giving away to people

This is the same as what happens when you use PGP. You have a timestamped message and a clear link between sender and recipient. If you need to hide the fact that you are communicating with a person in particular, Syme (or PGP for that matter) may not be the right tools.

There are several very interesting solutions to the problem of metadata that are being discussed currently (https://leap.se/es/docs/tech/hard-problems#Meta-data.problem). We don't think an acceptable solution has been found yet, but auto-alias pairs seem like a promising avenue.
OMG: the pain of doing a mobile HTML5 app and having it work across the entire spectrum of Android and iOS devices. OMG.
As someone who doesn't really know anything about scala, why is this a cool thing?

While such an early release is definitely aimed at scala enthusiast, I'd still like a sales pitch for the rest of us.
Google is the best option to get through their pay wall

Short snip:

"The tiny Channel Island of Alderney is launching an audacious bid to become the first jurisdiction to mint physical Bitcoins, amid a global race to capitalise on the booming virtual currency.

"The three-mile long British crown dependency has been working on plans to issue physical Bitcoins in partnership with the UK’s Royal Mint since the summer, according to documents seen by the Financial Times."
Cryptocat is available for your browser, Mac, and is coming out with iOS and Android apps in December.
why is this necroed?
"When the Internet was designed it was to have about 50 connected networks. With the explosion of networking, the number is now approaching 300."

Good read, thanks for posting this.
> but it boils down to my belief that ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia's fundraisers) are unsustainable for large websites

But... they work. They're not unsustainable. If they were unsustainable, the very example you cite wouldn't exist. Hell, even really small websites make a killing purely by soliciting donations. Maria Popova of brainpickings does it and makes an unbelievable amount from it (though, she does it by misleading her users and doing ethically dubious things here and there). There's a balance to be reached here, but I don't think it's particularly difficult to pull off.

> I have an intense distaste in the idea of fragmenting the community into "those who pay," and "those who don't" (a la Reddit Gold)

That depends on the implementation. Reddit did an awesome job of rolling out Reddit Gold, it most definitely did not fragment the community.

> Which leads us to what probably the main reason 4chan is a shitty business: because I choose for it to be one. If I'd decided to rape 4chan for all it was worth, as many would have

I don't know moot. Who's to say 4chan would've gotten as big if you were more involved in getting money out of it? Seems to me, that considering the userbase of 4chan, another place like 4chan but without the ads would've been the go to place for them if 4chan wasn't very much like 4chan as it's been. User-experience matters in getting the users -- that's why Reddit won, that's why Imgur won, etc. etc.
Exoverse.
New technology allows for aggressive tracking of your shopping habits
Using nukes to bomb entire civilian cities when the other side can't respond (US, 1945) is completely wrong. Using nukes against a conventional army is dubious - it is disproportionate in the extreme. The threat of using them may not be wrong (but I'm still not convinced on that point.)

Then (as sister comment says) neither side was playing the game right in the cold war.

I object to the way the game is set up in international relations - If we actually had a system to enforce international law it would be much much harder to justify having unilateral armies at all! My views on this are somewhat unconventional, though, so don't worry if I sound crazy; I may well be.
It's exactly the same as in JavaScript: JSON.parse(...)

Scala has Dynamic types for when you want to play rough like that.
You're looking for a sales pitch for Scala? I can't provide that, but I'd argue that having the same language on two rather different platforms is pretty cool/useful in any case.
Haha, I didn't pre-write it -- I'm just used to it.

I was in fact puzzled by this getting upvoted and not receiving any comments, so I refreshed the page a few times.
Thanks, I didn't know that. Even more scary, really - glad all that's over (if it actually is).
I remember how years ago I complained about how Javascript was the only language aviable for the web.

Nowadays you can even run sliced bread on Javascript... though, wouldn't it be better to focus on developing languages on top of asm.js or PNacl so we wouldn't rely on JS?
Ah, I didn't notice. But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword. In moot's case, that would be "4chan," but I'd imagine lots of people would find it useful.
Cool, I didn't know about zerocoin. There goes my afternoon.
I suggest you RTFA, some highlights regarding your fears:

- Integrated with sbt (including support for dependency management and incremental compilation)

- Can be used with your favorite IDE for Scala

- Generates Source Maps for a smooth debugging experience (step through your Scala code from within your browser supporting source maps)
Had exactly the same Heeeey moment :)
I remember a great science fiction novel, Dancers in the afterglow by Jack L Chalker, (well, it was great when I was in Grade 6) that had people meeting and randomly shuffling their own personalities/experiences with someone else after reaching adulthood. And then, after they had memorized and picked up the new personality, doing it again with someone else.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/08/us-usa-security-sn...

Either Petrobras (Brasilian state owned oil company) is a terrorist training camp, or they are doing industrial espionage there.

And I don't think that this 50000 networks ( http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/11/23/nsa-infected-50000-compu... ) have backdoors installed by the NSA for the terrorists neither.
Relevant: http://www.theonion.com/video/ceo-worked-way-up-from-son-of-...
The Creepiness of Mobile Analytics
Chrome on Windows and Linux, on HN and jsFiddle, the quotes were very obvious to me.
'Learn Ruby on Rails' is free today
For anyone setting up a non-federated chat system, why not Mumble?

Sure, it's primarily used for gaming, but the ability exists to use a text-based client, and everything is encrypted by default.
Replace, "Gay people should not be allowed to marry" with "Black people should not be allowed to marry white people" or "Jews should not be allowed to work as professionals", or "Women should stay at home and take care of the children"

When you start identifying a group, and placing restrictions on rights which you enjoy, you are taking a hateful position.
No single water drop should be blamed for the flood? Every person that had in its power to stop or report on this and didn't should be blamed. Every single person that authorised each step forward this program and state of things should be blamed too. And, of course, every single person that used this for his or his company profit should be in jail.

If nothing of this happens, then the entire system and all involved are guilty.
> while the content itself is encrypted, the "metadata" still isn't, which renders everything moot anyway. Timestamped messages are still too much information to be giving away to people

This is the same as what happens when you use PGP. You have a timestamped message and a clear link between sender and recipient. If you need to hide the fact that you are communicating with a person in particular, Syme (or PGP for that matter) may not be the right tools.

You've set your sights much too low, and it's unfortunately going to limit your product's market value.

Hiding metadata is a difficult problem to solve, but it's vital.
I completely agree. While asm.js has its problems, its moving in the right direction. Honestly, it seems like this wouldn't be too hard to add a backend target for asm.js, if its implemented well.
I think you can do it even without creating a fake account. The "People you may know" page seems to comprehensively list all of your friends' friends. All you'd need is some scraper software to build it into a better organised list.
Yes. I do indeed condemn creators to use a font which renders correctly and I also condemn them to use a size which is legible.
Those are the old 55nm chips. There are 28nm chips now.
"Gramatically challenged?" Where exactly?
For the record, I use weechat (termianl-based) on top of ZNC. ZNC is just a lot nicer in general than the screen/tmux based solution. Plus, SSHing on mobile is a pain in the ass - I'd rather use a native client.
A library is not a program.
Well, you are doing it right. We know from all bubbles past, though, plenty do it wrong -- all in and even all in on credit cards.
If you think about it, though, estimates (time, money, personnel) is really a management function.

You write "I'd rather them take my input and do their job of understanding trends." that's exactly what I'm talking about. They need to take your input, and do their job.

If a worker is told: "Here is what you (personnel) have to do (task), with these tools (environment), and we want you to do it in this amount of time (money)", and the worker fails to complete the work in the amount of time, then it is management's fault. They improperly estimated the amount of time it would take the worker to perform his task.

That management ask the worker how long the task will take means management does not understand the task, and if management does not understand the task, how can they know whether the worker's skill, experience, and knowledge is adequate for the task? Now, they also seem to not understand the worker's skills, experience, and knowledge, so the problem is compounded.

It is a management function to clearly define the tasks that must be performed, attract people whose skills, experience, and knowledge fit the tasks, and fund these people with the appropriate environment, tools, and salaries for them to perform the tasks.

That is the role of management. If they are unable to estimate what tasks must be performed, what people need to be retained, and how much money and time will be spent, they fail at their managerial duties.

That they then blame the workers themselves for improperly estimating the work is doubly wrong, a sign of managerial immaturity.
I started working with rails a few months ago. I skimmed the book in about 3 hours from start to finish while skipping the parts I knew I was comfortable with.

The book is really good and 100% worth reading if you're new to rails. I hope the author gets his money from kickstarter because he deserves it.