skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
@bertb

Communism isn't worse than anything no matter how bad. It's hard to determine how bad some of the less nasty communist regimes such as Cuba and Vietnam would have been without massive economic sanctions from the US. (Both Cuba and Vietnam wanted to be US allies.)

There are several cases among my examples of the US taking action against real democracies.

Some references:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d'état

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'état
>Most of the 9/11 attackers were Saudis, and it was done in response to our presence there

We will need some source on that because it is evident 9/11 was an inside job.
>>Most Americans think we already spend too much on foreign aid.

I've yet to meet an American who thinks the Trillion dollar military-industrial debt that they owe has been worth it.

At all.
This comment sets a good example.
I find Google's actions to be bizarre.

Getting people to link to you is what SEO is all about. Basically every site concerned with SEO does it in one form or another -- I thought this was what most every blog affiliate program was about!

So Google decides to "punish" RapGenius just because its program got a little bit of public notice, while 99.9% of other sites which do the same, continue doing the same thing, unpunished?

It just comes across as capricious and petty. For a site as large as Google, there should be some kind of due process involved with clear published guidelines, or (preferably) they should just work on improving their algorithm.

How is what Rap Genius is doing any different than Amazon or iTunes paying you for affiliate links, or you paying a blog to advertise you, or buying a friend a beer to include a link to you? Where exactly does the line get drawn?
Redesigning the office for better hacking
Yeah. unfortunately, people are DICKS a lot. That's what we're trying to fix.
If I understand this correctly, is it really that worrying an argument? One can't use covert telephone recording (i.e., without two-party consent) as evidence in most states, and it's important that the person being recorded didn't intend for the conversation to be recorded and available in the future as evidence. Similarly, one would expect leaks to not hold up as evidence.

Much as I also dislike the ruling, the argument here seems quite reasonable to me.
You said you want a desktop UI that fits a desktop computer's strengths, right?

Well, one of the strengths of a desktop computer is its (very efficient) keyboard. So why would you want an UI that pretends the only input device that matters is the mouse?

I actually like Unity. The flashy effects are tasteful. When doing an Alt-Tab window switch, you can finally select the window you want with your mouse (something that was missing and was annoying me). You can also easily switch between windows created by the same application, which is really useful when you get used to it (works by either keyboard shortcut or a mouse click on the app's icon in the Launcher). The app menu is always displayed at the top, mixed with the notifications bar. When maximizing a window, the window's title bar goes away, which is useful on these 16:9 format screens (vertical space is more precious than horizontal space). All the apps I care about are displayed in the Launcher. For everything else, I can open the Dash and do a search. The Launcher is on the left, which is OK-ish for me, as again, on a 16:9 screen vertical space is more precious than horizontal space. Speaking of mouse interactions, there's a lot more you can do with it - like maximizing windows by dragging the title-bar at the top of the screen, or left/right aligning/resizing windows on half of the screen, again by dragging the title-bar of that window to the left or the right. I noticed my non-technical wife using this UI and she had no problems with it.

Things are not perfect. There are 2 issues that bother me about Ubuntu:

1)The Launcher is not customizable at all. I would rather have it on the right, but I can't do that, which is retarded.

2) Every freaking version breaks something. Ubuntu 12.10 broke the app "Startup Disk Creator", an app which I was often using for creating bootable USB drives and it's still not fixed. Ubuntu 13.04 broke Skype (though it can be argued the fault is shared by Skype as their Linux port is a piece of shit). Ubuntu 13.10 broke my Bluetooth, I couldn't get a L2TP VPN connection to work no matter how hard I tried and it also broke the multiple-screens support (I don't like working with multiple screens, so when I'm plugging in my external monitor, I turn the laptop's monitor off, but Ubuntu 13.10 can't detect when I unplug the external monitor and the laptop's own monitor stays off). Ubuntu 13.10 is the most buggy Ubuntu version I've ever used.

So right now I'm back on 12.04 LTS, which is fine and stable and I hope the next LTS (14.04) will fix my Bluetooth and the multiple displays settings. Basically, Ubuntu's short release cycle doesn't really work and if you don't stay on LTS versions, then you're in for a world of hurt.
It isn't just the military presence that drives fundamentalist Islam. "The Great Satan" is evil because of culture - educating children will also be seen part of the same evil - Westernisation.

cf Boko Haram - the Nigerian group whose name is literally "Western education is sinful".
Then why post anything at all?
There are real problems here? What are these problems?
Headset to read dog's mind
>But making peace isn't simply a matter of declaring that you will "make peace, not war".

Yes it is. Because the same is true of war: you have to decide to do it. The problem is, the American people have subjugated all their decision-making responsibilities to people who are too lazy, stupid, or just plain evil to think that anything other than non-stop war is their solution. This has been the case in America for 80 years now - so its a generational thing as well, at this point..
Is there any reason to overwrite data multiple times on flash storage? I thought that the principle was due to head-alignment on spinning disks (and data theoretically being recoverable from the 'edge' of tracks). Even this is considered overkill for just about everyone. How does it make any sense on flash storage, which operates on completely different principles?
Launching is very overrated. I mainly emailed friends, family, and shared https://www.uncover.com via social media. Luckily, it got picked up by Hacker News and some other outlets. We got some great traffic in the beginning, but a "good launch" alone isn't going to make or break you. It's about the longterm value you can offer your customers.
This blogspam adds nothing to Bunnie's original article, which was already posted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980058 (179 points, 37 comments)
Once you said that rain sounded hissy, I immediately noticed it. If I turn rain almost all the way down and waves just a little bit up, I get a muffled rain sound that sounds a little bit like rain falling on a tent that I'm inside, which I now realize is one of my favorite sounds. So add that sound too!
I consider myself sophisticated and I still use Google for something like Rap Genius:

"rap genius kendrick lamar swimming pools" would get me there quicker than any other way.

It's incredible that now that search string sends me to other pages that link to RG's lyrics but not directly to theirs.
So don't go to Krugman for technology insights. Go to him for economic insights. Consider the recent discussion about "positive vs. normative economics". It's a similar point here.

There are Bitcoinistas who would like governments to abolish their own currencies and make Bitcoin the currency of the land, or perhaps adopt a Bitcoin-standard akin to a gold standard.

Those are economic policy proposals. Are they good ideas? It makes sense to listen to what economists have to say when you are trying to figure out the answer.
To which the NSA's answer will be, "Yo, dawg, we heard you like spying..."
They still innovate, they just direct all their effort to more profitable microtransactions and ways force everyone online.
I don't find this very insightful.

Drones kill civilians? Yeah, we know. Collateral damage is a reality of war.

Drones are weapons? Is that really a revelation?

I think there is a lot to criticize about the drone program, but it shouldn't read like this.
Yes, I agree. I normally leave a clutter in the evening. I clean up glasses and plates, but normally my desk is pretty messy and dirty when the daylight shines upon it. When I tidy up before I take a seat, it puts me in the right mindset to start a normal work routine.
Websites to buy drugs have been around with weird e-currency like pecunix and e-buillion for so many years before bitcoin existed. The only difference between silk road and them is how little silk road did to stay low key.
Would it then be possible for someone with a new Internet hookup in the UK to confirm/disconfirm this?
This information now justifies having shipments sealed in a way that shows that they have been tampered with. Any foreign entity ordering goods from these companies now has an incentive to visit the shipping location and place their own identifying tape (that is frequently changed) on the packaged equipment and possibly GPS tracking devices on the shipment as well to be able to determine if they are diverted away from a reasonable shipping path to make unscheduled stops.

I would love to see someone start performing a large scale analysis of shipping paths using GPS tracking devices to create algorithms that flag certain shipping paths as anomalous. Offering services and creating products that guarantee shipping security is now a legitimate market to create a startup for.
Volgograd train station rocked by suicide bombing
This has already been extensively discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979023 (144 points, 71 comments)
Apple’s 2013 performance relative to the S&P 500 costs Tim Cook $4M in stock
I did. It is really interesting working with them, even if they change their mind very often.
However, some of them could be afraid of using new developments that you may think they could actually improve their working lives.
Bitcoin will succeed if enough people believe that it will succeed, and bitcoin will fail if enough people believe it will fail.

Uh, the problem is that this is not a one-time succeed or fail thing. If one fine day, enough people think bitcoin will fail (or just think it no longer serves their purpose, say, it no longer has a chance of significant value increase), the consequences for many people may be very painful - even if for many previous days, most people thought bitcoin would succeed, even if some imaginary point had reached where some commentator could say "wow, looks like bitcoin has actually succeed".
What stuns me the most about drones is how unfair they are. The targets are mostly the Middle-East and they have absolutely no chance to take them down. And then they wonder why they attack innocent Americans working in an embasy. How are you supposed to fight something you cannot see? You don't, so you attack something of the enemy, no matter what, because it is the last option to hurt him.
Aha! I new I wasn't being so clever when I referenced Yule-235 in a letter to my aunt last Christmas.
Our brains are physically different [0].

As much as I believe in the 'nurture' argument, given that our brains are wired very differently based on gender, I find it difficult to believe that this won't cause differences in both desire and aptitude. It seems absurd to me that so many smart people have to make the nurture XOR nature argument, and that there are so few people making nurture AND nature arguments.

Adjunct to this is that old chestnut about how we socialise girls to like toys they can care for and boys to like cars. Here we also now have evidence that suggests that we are born this way and the socialisation is just on top of what we started with [1].

I'm not trying to make the argument that it is more nature than nurture or that I know the precise underpinnings of a decent model. I just think that we needlessly politicise something which in my opinion will eventually be in the reach of empiricism.

I hope that the open-minded liberals will fare better than traditionalists in managing the separation between science and their own values.

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/male-and-f...

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/
Not to disagree about the main point but US could do more to harm Bitcoin than just banning it internally, especially given that China seems already hostile to Bitcoin.
Gold and silver have industrial uses. Gold and silver are used in jewelry. Gold and silver have proven to be a store of value for thousands of years. Gold and silver are also, to a first approximation, truly anonymous.

Not one of those four characteristics is true for Bitcoin, so saying it's "just like" gold and silver is a bit of a stretch. This doesn't mean Bitcoin is awful, as Krugman's trollish column is titled, but just that it doesn't have the same intrinsic floor value as gold and silver.
> but pressing the a "death button" for a website is not a solution.

What is a solution then? It seems like a good deterrent. It has to hurt.

In Poland (where I'm from) they similarly punished Ceneo, Skąpiec, Nokaut (all most popular price comparator services) and even Tesco. See http://www.seoportal.pl/ceneo-skapiec-tesco-ukarane-przez-go... (Polish) or http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre... (English by Google Translate).

Not one of these websites has died, but a lesson was taught.
While I think it's true that BTC won't fall below the cost of mining 1 BTC, that's not really saying anything.

If BTC falls below the cost of mining people will stop mining and the network will adjust to the reduced difficulty, making the cost of mining drop.

A problem is that if too few people mine, the network becomes easy to compromise. That's a problem that bitcoin has, and other currencies (and things like gold and silver) do not.
every time i have read a statement like this in the past it has been followed at some point by a crushing, total and complete, reversal that shows that the exact opposite effect was produced from the anticipated outcome.
Look, the most important thing here is to make sure that study can be used to confirm hajile's prior beliefs, ok? Let's keep our eye on the prize.
One thing that really helps me is music. Some people like the coffee shop sounds. I don't. I'm the type you see sitting in the office with headphones on all the time, listening to fast music, and really feeling wired in.
At home I often forget to put on some music, because I don't get distracted by people. But without music I find myself looking at youtube etc.
When I have music on it puts me in the right mindset, and start producing to the beat (be it drum, be it machine ;))
How To Stop Being Afraid and Take a Leap: Raise Your Bar For What’s Possible
Its hard to talk about Japanese management techniques without talking about Deming.

So Jidoka is pretty much Deming #11. Poka-yoke is obviously Deming #3. Kaizen is Deming #5. At least according to the "Out of the Crisis" poster I used to have.

I keep my Deming fandom quiet, he's about as anti-american as you can get. I'd get less flack if I said I was a Marxist. Its too bad, Deming was a genius. I'd say this whole topic is NSFW because you can't get further away from modern American management than Deming. Its safer to quote Marx at work than Deming.
There doesn't seem to be a gender component in the situation you described.
Very odd indeed to see a paywalled article hit the top
Very well written.

I think if anything, the fact that they are funded and need to produce positive ROI for their investment creates incentive to "grow at all costs". However, the cost has been too great.
And, to summarize the single most important point made there:

No, this is not the UK government's "porn filter", because (1) no such thing actually exists yet and (2) this isn't the same sort of thing as that would be if it did exist -- it's one ISP's opt-in whitelist offered to people who want a way to keep their children "safe".

(I am not defending such whitelists, by the way. But even if there is some day a Great UK Adult Content Filter, this is not what it will be.)
Wow, code golf challenges are usually easy problems and the hard part is the optimization--these problems would be hard even on their own. Good luck!
I'm in the situation you describe right now. I blogged about it a couple months ago: http://neat.io/blog/diary-of-a-programmer-with-no-clue-about.... The resulting HN discussion has a lot of good tips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686290

My launch didn't go 'well' to the standards that I constantly see on HN. I got < 10 users and a lot of those were existing beta testers.

Now I'm 2 months in and I have been getting a fairly consistent number of new users each day, however its dropped in the past couple of weeks (I'm blaming the holiday season).

Here's what I've learnt so far:

- SEO is very important for discovery

- Keep your product evolving to fit the needs of your current users

- Keep current users happy

- Be ultra responsive to support enquiries - this is key to keeping happy users

- Adjust your pricing model based on feedback

- Get your site linked to on other sites even if seemingly unrelated - I get a bit of traffic from a design site that has my site in a list of 'beautiful, flat landing pages'

It would have been nice to get a whole slew of users on day 1 but realistically this doesn't happen unless you have an existing captive audience. It does dampen the expected meritocracy that comes with developing your own product.
War is the fastest way forward. The funding of war machines comes from a desire for possessions. A fear of being weak. This will always take precedence in the minds of politicians and aristocrats over any other concerns. Stop investing intellectual capital into dreams and ambitions, and we will continue to stagnate. Stop investing intellectual capital in the military and bureaucracy and we must actually have a healthy dialogue and interplay with the rest of the world.

I grew up in the DCon capital of the world, friend. I have heard every iteration of the jingoist "spend or die" speech. I am fed, clothed, and housed by tax dollars spent on "expanding capability" and "maintaining status quo". It is not about security and freedom, it is about securing profits and freeing untapped investment. Do you think that DCon is somehow different than SV? Small groups of whip smart young people using the lost ideas of an older generation to carve out a slice of an expanding market. Information Technology and War Technology are two facets of the same gem.

Your original premise may be accurate, but i do not believe it is correct. The path you take effects the place you go in many ways, and not all of them are obvious or even observable at the moment of choosing.
Really? I haven't received my bill for agent orange in forever. Anyone sent to prison for authorising its use? Civil lawsuits? No, there was no cost (except to those directly affected) for using agent orange.
Juniper were making good inroads into the corporate firewall market at the expense of Checkpoint. It'll be interesting to see whether this sees a move back to Checkpoint as the firewall product of choice.
Why should their descendants get a damn thing, they didn't do the work.

Copyrights should end at death, or a fixed term in the case of a corporation.
> "How is it different if the device in question is instead a cruise missile? A rifle? A knife? A fist?"

I am pretty sure it's easier to dehumanize people when they are merely pixels on a screen.
Definitely. He did some amazing stuff with the original Xbox. Somewhat dated, but worth a read.

His ebook has been made freely available in memory of Aaron Swartz:

http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf
How so? Most americans have unfiltered access to the internet where they can get far more information than the old days of having 1 or 2 local newspapers and 3 TV broadcast networks.
It is interesting that whenever this subject is brought up, someone will eventually introduce the subject of guilt. Can you articulate why you responded in this way? Do you feel that you have been accused of something? What exactly would the metaphorical equivalent of being a "witch" mean in this context?

I'll point out that we could have a conversation about diversity in hiring without ever introducing the subject of guilt.

This is a bit off-topic but I am fascinated about the exact reasons why some people react to conversations as if they have been accused of something. I think you might want to consider that nothing is useful is gained if you introduce the concept of "guilt" into a conversation where it is not needed.

I'll offer an example that has already been discussed on hundreds of blogs. You may recall in 2007 that John Kenzer interviewed Alex Payne? (I am sorry that the interview seems to be offline: http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twi... but it is in the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20070416091128/http://www.radical...) and Alex Payne offered some common sense observations about the difficulty of scaling Rails:

"Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues ... far sooner than I think we would on another framework. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you ... or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both."

You may recall that David Heinemeier Hansson's response was overheated and irrational. He said that Alex Payne was blaming Rails for all of the problems at Twitter. But Payne had never blamed Rails for anything, he merely talked about how they were struggling to make it scale.

(I am sorry to say that David's response appears to be offline now: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000608.html , and the Internet Archive doesn't have it: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://david.heinemeierhansson..... As a side note, let us all mourn how many important conversations get erased off the web.)

Many smart commentators pointed out that there was no need for David Heinemeier Hansson to introduce the concept of blame into that conversation. Alex Payne's words could have simply been taken as a constructive starting point for a larger conversation about how to scale Rails. But for some reason Hansson felt the need to frame the conversation in terms of accusations and guilt.

The same is true about this conversation, and your reaction. We can have a constructive conversation about increasing diversity in hiring without ever introducing the concept of guilt.

And yet, every time this subject comes up, someone feels the need to frame the whole thing in terms of accusations and guilt. The level of defensiveness on display is remarkable.
There are clear guidelines and due process.

Amazon and iTunes aren't paying you for the link they are paying you for the sale.

In the second and third cases it is no different if you're paying for a keyword link and if Google found out about it you would be penalized.
Google Play Offers Free and Exclusive Gifts for 2013 Holiday Season
I can't really imagine too many better firsthand accounts than someone who actually worked on a drone program. Would you have the guardian publish only secondhand opinion pieces?

Fwiw they also published an op ed by a defence minister and linked to it twice in this article so I don't see the manipulation angle on a newspaper wide scale, although obviously the guardian editorial board has some strong opinions. Stronger than other newspapers? You'd have to make that case.

Incidentally, while I appreciate your attempt to keep a clear head, your comment that things are complex applies to almost any situation worth discussing.
Your site looks interesting, but note that https://elipsis.io/status is a 404.
Using longaccess-cli, step by step