skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Fear to defend one's stature or business is often the bullshit used to compartmentalize the means to reach an end that "protects" something, in spite of costs to others. That seems to fit the definition of concrete, areligous "evil." It's shitty, but many decision-makers are fine with expedience if it can't come back to them.
Now that's a service people will pay good money for!
This is like a modern day Game of Thrones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6892935
A whole generation of kids will now grow up forgetting to trim off trailing whitespace.

Thanks, Congress.
I think the point is that some people had come to expect that blocking works a certain way, and they're not happy that it has changed. In particular, it seems that people were using blocking as a way of having a pseudo-private status - public to everyone except these people. Now, their tweets are public to everyone, and the people they're blocking are just hidden from their view. This seems odd to me because it never occurred to me that this pseudo-privacy was possible - I always assumed that anything tweeted from a public account is visible to the whole world. And, of course, it always was - blocking someone just made it more difficult for that person to see your tweets, not impossible.

But perhaps that difficulty was enough, and this was important to people who used the feature. Logically, blocking people from reading your tweets seems almost silly, because you can't really control who sees your tweets from a public account, but the illusion of control probably did a lot for the peace of mind of people who were being harassed.
If someone is stalking or harassing, they can just set up another account - blocking has no affect but to antagonize.

If someone is being stalked or harassed, they need to decide whether they should be posting publicly on twitter, because no amount of blocking will prevent a stalker from seeing what they post.

The only thing the victim can do with regard to twitter is:

- Stop posting publicly (post privately or don't post)

- Stop themselves from seeing the harassing messages, which this new block functionality does.

The change makes complete sense, as it doesn't deceive users into thinking blocking makes something private.
Did Brain Scans Just Save a Convicted Murderer From the Death Penalty?
That's one answer, but it's not a very good one. Can we think of no better option than for people who are being harassed to 'decide whether they should be posting publicly'?
We should teach 5 year olds computers with technology available in 1993. QBASIC, Logo, HyperCard, ... (Not joking.)
"Can I pay my utility bills with them? No. Can I may my mortgage with them? No. Can I go into most shops or online stores and buy stuff with them? No."

Still the same in 2013.

But at least there are companies emerging to tackle these problems.
Showing children that a simple set of instructions can allow a complex operation to be performed is incredibly important.

Heck when talking to my non-programming friends the #1 issue is how they think the trade is too complex to dive into.

While I would not wish that everyone becomes a software engineer, programming is quite useful.
Also:

'416D65726963612043616E20436F646520'.decode('hex')

Edit: In Python 3,

bytes.fromhex('416D65726963612043616E20436F646520').decode('utf-8')
You have a very utilitarian view of education that I find
uncomfortably limiting.

My own view is that rather than worrying about children 'passing' some
arbitrary standardised test. We should be aiming at teaching children
to think critically and have a large intellectual toolbox to work
from.

Of course; I'm weird in that I think children should be introduced to
as many concepts as possible as early as possible and that the
principles underlying calculus and differential equations are exactly
the sort of thing that a bright 7 year old might find engaging
intellectual toys. I also think that education is a lifelong process
and needs to include both regimented group learning and self-guided
exploration.
oh yes, the latest copy-cat of http://mashape.com
My coworker has a rule in our office: if you have to do something for a second time, automate it.

He's been getting us all to follow this, and it has paid off many times. It's not just about whether it pays off for an individual task — it's a mentality you develop as you go into future tasks.
No, 	Gmail won't blow up e-mail marketing
Love the idea but I have two suggestions: let people filter by country and let them vote or star a particular API.
You should have array caching for the responses coded!
Ok I see your point; but I want to add that one of the reasons your old account has spam is because you don't use it; I don't know what algorithm they are using but it certainly relies on usability data; I don't know exactly but could be: what language you usually speak in; what hours of the day you receive and read important email, what subjects you read about, etc etc.
According to the announcement, if you've already selected the option to ask before displaying external content, when this feature rolls out to your account it will also default to set the new setting to ask before displaying external images.
Top comment on the blog post.

"Bill, you are really inspiring me to increase my concern for the critical issues of economy and technology. You are a gift to the world. thank u."

Wow, Gates has really cleaned up his public perception.
Not just ignorance of coding, in general, but of the specifics of the system.

It's one thing to add a new feature to a brand-new project, especially in terms of how soon you get visible results.

It's another thing to do it with a legacy system. You run up against all manner of edge cases within just the internal ecosystem, never mind the larger one.
Friction matters. Yes, technically, they are public, but if you make it harder to get at information, a certain percentage of harassers will drop off.
Just goes to show you, if you wait long enough, that game you never had a chance to play but have been eying for a decade will be given out for free... so now it can sit on your hard drive where you still won't have time to play it!!

Now I just need wait for the OddWorld games to start coming out for free... any decade now...
I feel so sorry for the rank and file North Koreans every time I think about that country.

As far as one of the NK 'inner circle' being executed though ... I only hope it hurt.
It still was visible to those people; they just had to view the persons feed while not logged in or under a different account. If people were relying on this feature to control access to their tweets, they were not doing it right.
Bots Now Reportedly Account For 61.5% Of Website Visitors
I see; how curious their interpretation of public and private must be! Let the disillusionment begin!
Robert Sapolsky[0] has his Stanford course on human behavioral biology on youtube, almost in its entirety. The whole course is very accessible and much broader than the topic here, but if you wanna go straight for the molecular genetics section, it's parts 4 & 5. Amazing lecturer.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky
Given the principle that programs are written for other humans to read and only incidentally for computers to execute, treating it as a language for communicating with other humans doesn't seem silly to me at all.
I just don't see the value in blocking people beyond muting them anyway. They can just create a new account and view whatever they want anyway. This way, they don't know if they are blocked or if they are just ignoring them, which is probably better.
I agree. In Cambridge, UK, there are some phd students from Computer Laboratory in University of Cambridge, who go and teach first grade kids concepts in computer science. This does not necessarily involve coding. I heard they were teaching them how packets work by making some kids routers, one client, on server and packets etc.
Twitter just said “stalking is okay by us”
Were you running a proxy or something on their box? I did that once to stream Netflix when overseas and they bugged me about that too.
It would probably be easiest to buy bitcoins with Coinbase and trade them for litecoins at an exchange. You are going to have a hard time buying any cryptocurrency with a card, because it is too easy for you to reverse the charge and take the irreversible cryptocurrency. The places that let you buy bitcoins with cards are a lot more expensive for this reason.
and the ruby equivalent:

"416D65726963612043616E20436F646520".scan(/../).map { |x| x.hex.chr }.join

=> "America Can Code "
There is currently a great deal of potential for disruption of engineering business organization hierarchy. At the heart of the problem is how to cohesively address the limited distribution of control, freedom, money, stability and reward.

A good example of one aspect of this is LinkedIn's technical career track. Beyond sole contributor status, you can be promoted to either a Manager or a Staff Engineer. Managers have direct reports, while Staff Engineers lead teams with a technical responsibility, each with their own progression: Manager < Sr Manager < Director < Sr Director < VP < Sr VP and Staff Engineer < Sr Staff < Principal < Distinguished < Fellow. The Engineering track is more of an accreditation system focusing on freedom as opposed to control (control of things vs people).

Most Silicon Valley companies struggle with retention, because they internally cannot simultaneously offer a "fair" career progression/compensation and compete with the raw efficient risk/reward of the free market (e.g., poaching). In other words, you can't promote engineers with potential over engineers with good track records without consequently discouraging hard work. On the other hand, you absolutely don't want engineers with potential to leave because of an inability to offer opportunity equal to what they can find elsewhere.

Companies will ultimately need to offer choice to engineers: higher vs lower risk/reward. One possibility is a commission based engineering track. Engineers would choose between the stability of traditional progression/salary and a higher reward commission based system with a small base salary. The commission system would require results-based quantitative systems like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to quantify both the value of the proposal to the company beforehand, and a quantitative measurement of its success. Switching between tracks could occur each quarter allowing engineers to tap temporary motivation increases. Mixing and matching traditional and commissioned engineers would result in unique balances of high motivation and stability (since the team lead is not their manager), which would highly align with stable vs high risk/growing aspects/departments of the company.

The increasing competition faced from engineers starting their own companies will require companies to adapt new compensation models to more efficiently allocate resources (e.g., autonomy, cash, responsibility, recognition, etc...). I think a commission based system holds a lot of promise for those of greater capability.
True, friction does matter. I think tweets should cost a penny, personally, retweets ha'penny, farthings for follows.
On the X-Frame-Options Security Header
George Orwell's book "1984" (written 1948 and prior to the formation of North Korea) outlines a state eerily similar to North Korea with its erasure of people's past, punishment for not clapping enthusiastically and generally for "dreaming different dreams", as this article puts it. It's disturbing to see these kind of states still managing to transfer their totalitarian systems from generation to generation with no foreseeable hope of a positive change.
Consider the idea that reducing risk to military personnel actually provokes a steep increase in the propensity to indiscriminately wipe out civilians, simply because the fear of any consequence has been mitigated.

So as you approach zero risk, the occurence of applied lethal force accelerates on a curve toward an asymptote.
Learning to Code for Non-technical People - 80/20 approach
HN discourages humor without content, to keep the culture focused around serious discussion. You can have a sense of humor, but it should be in the context of the topic and add something meaningful to the discussion.

There's nothing wrong with the Reddit culture of competing for top joke, but HN strives to be something different. The internet already has plenty of homes for "$nerdReference + $nostalgia == $karma++".
>Wait, ANOTHER wedding? Didn't we do this a year or two ago also?

There is a reason for that. The locals use the US as their weapon of revenge. So if one family has an ongoing argument with another family and one of them is throwing a wedding, the other family reports it as an Al Quaida meeting.

Often these family conflicts have lasted for years already and likely more people died in the past (not by drones)

So it was a successful hit, you know, just not for the party that shot off the actual hardware.
This is what PG blocks:
Social networking
Online gaming
Cyber bullying
Pornography and adult
Suicide and self harm
Weapons, violence, gore & hate
Anonymizers, filesharing & hacking
Drugs and criminal skills
Dating
Phishing, malware & spyware

If you choose "I don't want any protection" then it gives you the choice of what filters you want
It's all very well when it's a simple variable but quite often I have come up against variables that would take a whole paragraph of text to explain their purpose and don't have a concise or obvious name.
I would agree with you if all the carriers offered transparent plans that charge you just the monthly plan amount without the phone subsidy if you bring your own phone. Only T-Mobile does at the moment. As it is, I can bring my own unlocked phone, but I'll still get charged the subsidy.
I was lucky in that my father purchased a ti99-4a but kids with exposure to PCs, let alone programming in those days were definitely rare!

We had a "gently used" *86 in 6th grade classroom, which I think was the first PC exposure for most of my fellow classmates.
nice! Mine was similar to olefoo's:

x = "416d65726963612043616e20436f646520"
''.join([chr(int(y, 16)) for y in [x[l:l+2] for l in range(0, len(x), 2)]])

I do think it's funny that they (erroneously?) put the extra space on the end of the string. If you read the press release for the bill I don't think the 20 is supposed to be there.
Cool. So it used to be the case that my AdBlock configuration got to filter the image loads in gmail, and now... not so much. Thanks, Google!
Reminds me of this Steve Jobs quote. Amusingly, you could substitute 'television networks' for 'social networks' and it would be a relevant argument today, despite being made 17 years ago:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth." - Steve Jobs, Interview in WIRED magazine (February 1996)
How about instead of writing new legislation against cell phone unlocking we enforce the anti trust laws we already have?
3D-printed skull simulates sensations of brain surgery
I would be more worried about the TSA accidentally wiping my hard drive when they try to crack the encryption.
Well, manslaughter. I can't find anything that points to him intentionally hitting and killing those people.
Has “Not everyone can be a programmer” been studied?

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163631/has-no...

I don't think this is a good idea. I don't think programming is hard and only for "the chosen ones", but not everybody can do it.
Real Python Advanced Web Development Kickstarter
And by the way, Go 1.3 will include support for Native Client (aka "NaCL").

Also: Russ Cox is the Chuck Norris of Go programming.
pg in 2012 Sept

"The one thing we can track precisely is how well the startups in each batch do at fundraising after Demo Day. But we know that's the wrong metric. There's no correlation between the percentage of startups that raise money and the metric that does matter financially, whether that batch of startups contains a big winner or not."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html)
Basically the same thing they do with keyword (not provided). You can get the referring keyword via adwords but not analytics with organic search. So if you pay for adwords you can see what keywords your users are clicking but if you don't pay then no data for you. Google only cares about user privacy when they can sell the data.
Access Wikipedia articles by emoji
Thanks for this. There is so much false information floating around, it was a relief to find a presentation of the facts, backed up with evidence.
Answering the Call on Cell Phone Unlocking
What's up with the path to an XML file in the PDF?
See top:
http://cardenas.house.gov/sites/cardenas.house.gov/files/ACC...
IT Certifications for 2014
Minecraft started as a Java browser plugin game. I think that's what the GP is referring to, not "Show HN: Minecraft in 3 lines of Javascript"

https://minecraft.net/classic/
I see your point, but you're bringing your own assumptions about public and private here, and Twitter doesn't have to obey those assumptions (for clarity: I share your assumptions about public and private).

From another perspective, Twitter is an institution that makes rules to govern the conduct of its users. Those rules are made public, and users can construct their own order on top of those rules. This is pretty much the principle behind rule of law - we get to know what's allowed and what isn't, and we can then construct our own arrangements on top of this foundation. Some people came up with some creative ways of using Twitter's rules to control access to their tweets, which is exactly the kind of behaviour one should expect. Then Twitter changed the rules, invalidating the order that these users had constructed. They're upset, and that's not unreasonable.

Sure, there's a principled argument to say that "public stuff should always be public". Twitter's new policy makes tweets much more like blog posts - you can decide which blogs and comments you want to read, but you can't decide who reads your blog. I have no real problem with that as a policy. But it's still the case that Twitter, seemingly without warning, changed a policy in a way that broke social conventions that their existing userbase had developed. That's legitimately annoying for those people.
The "American Can Code " Act

You missed the trailing 0x20
So this is how Go will make its appearance on Chrome Browser & Chrome OS? Pretty cool. I was a little scared off from NaCl from the C/C++ requirement, but Go will make that a little easier to handle. When is 1.3 suppose to be released?
check out runnable.com :)
Not everyone can sing, but we still have music class. It's useful to at the very least give kids a toe in the water regarding the subject.
more to the point, every point of friction introduced in the harassment process reduces the amount of harassment by some factor.
Why do you think the servers are in Mountain View?
For one thing, since Twitter capitulated to them in this regard, it means that they should continue their bad behaviours, because it will cause Twitter to change their policies.
Yes! My oldest is 4.5, and I'm thinking about how to assemble a text-only machine to force typing, learning commands, navigating the file system, etc. Might as well start him off with linux and bash instead of DOS and batch, though. :-)
I find quite often a little hard to believe. Occasionally, maybe; and why not provide a paragraph of text? Sometimes it's the right thing to do.
they can now retweet your stuff and get their followers to mob you
Changes to Twitter's blocking behavior, and a workaround
We did a simple example, which was to give all the students in the class one "step" as a program. And we lined them up. And then we did the towers of Hanoi solution (although none of them could solve the problem prior to us running it).

If you're interested in recreating this. You just need flash cards (with the step on them) and a couple of colored hats (I think it was three) to represent branch targets.

So card might be "Look at the towers tell the person behind you which has the largest disk" and that persons card is "if the largest disk is on the left one, the person in the green hat goes next", the person behind them has "if the largest is on the center pole the person in the purple hat goes next", the person behind them has "move the disk on the left pole to the right pole" etc. When you "jump" all the kids go to the back of the line except the one with the green/purple/yellow hat and that kid does their step then the one behind them etc.

Its a lot of fun. And you can mix up the line and watch the disks get put into very strange arrangements.
AnyPerk (YC W12) Goes from Taco Bell Parking Lot to Silicon Valley Fast Track
not sure about needing to filter by country? but voting, and meta tagging too... +++
https://github.com/cisco/openh264/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS

Contributors are 100% Chinese. Is this project make in Cisco China R&D?
"the single most useful piece of information a sender gets from you loading the image is that/when you read the email"

Marketers around the world rejoice.

I'm guessing everyone just had a bump in open rates today.
I wonder if, instead of dumping excess power into heaters (http://ludens.cl/Electron/picelc/picelc.html), it would ever make sense for this system to pump water back to the top of the system. It might not, if the water flow is short-term stable and only varies across seasons.
I think as far as classifying it as a foreign language is concerned, it could likely be a reflection of the fact that US education curricula are decided at a state level in general, and so the federal government has limited ability to incentivize source code literacy in schools except (I'm guessing) through a measure such as this.
Open source does not mean free to build & use. It means open source.
[NY TECH] Big International Tech Holiday Party
I'm still confused why Cisco is even allowed to do this. Do they pay a flat license fee to MPEG-LA for unlimited usage? I would think they would pay per-seat like most video codecs.
> When is 1.3 suppose to be released?

Around 7 months from now according to http://blog.golang.org/go12.
"But I read mostly nonfiction because I always want to learn more about how the world works."

Boy oh boy, if I had a quarter every time I heard that probably I could get a tall Starbucks latte. Many, many people are under the assumption that fiction is stuff that somebody made up and hence useless while non-fiction gives you information about the world; so if you're a busy person, read non-fiction (it's of, course debatable if such a neat classification even can be done). What these people do not realize is that great fiction can provide more information about the world, humanity in general, and what's even more important, yourself, then you can ever glimpse by reading another Gladwell book.
What about x264 hosted at VideoLAN: http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html? It's open source and people have implemented tons of cool software tools with it.
I like the the site, although I could think of one simple thing that would make the website a bit nicer and a lot easier to read:

body { max-width:700px; margin:1em auto }

This CSS narrows the page so the text lines aren't so long, but keeps the centering.
Here's my take:

Let n be the number of people needed.
Probability that a person's birthday is not today: 364/365

Prob. that no one's birthday is today: (364/365)^n

Prob. that someone's birthday is today: 1 - (364/365)^n

Prob. that someone's birthday covers every day: (1 - (364/365)^n)^365

Setting equal to 0.5 and solving, I get n==2284, which is close to metaphyze's brute force number.