skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you just want to play regex golf this site appeared before Christmas and there was quite a discussion [1] although there are a few more levels now: http://regex.alf.nu/

I'm still not happy with my 214 on Alphabetical including one false match (I was 202 or something with everything correctly matched).

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6941231
Niice.co - a search engine with taste
At my work, we have had arguments about what searches in an REST API should return in the case that no results (literally, in our parlance, "no documents") were found. Is that a 404 or a 200?
This article is dated 2009. Are these still security holes in Opera?
Boiling water & water gun in extreme cold (Northern Ontario)
there are more than those two sides. this definitely altered the balance between the left and right in the US. this lead to shutting down COINTELPRO, the PRISM of that age.
Should tech recruiters learn to code?
There's an 8x difference between 4GB of ram vs 4Gb of ram.
Looking in the dictionary, I see liberal as "willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own", which is what I (as a European) had always thought -- what does it mean in America?
Rules that are objective (eg: no noise heard in a residence that exceeds 40 db between 9 PM and 8 AM) are the right way to stop the nuisance behavior not[.]

On paper, that sort of thing is great, but as far as I've seen, it falls apart pretty quickly in practice. As someone currently trying, and failing, to use proper channels to deal with antisocial behaviour from a neighbour, the `objective' rules actually end up tying the hands of those trying to fix the problem. What starts out as a well-intentioned action with the aim of ensuring fairness pretty quickly ends up acting as a shield for the offender and a roadblock for the victim. In my particular case, and the case of several others with whom I've spoken, the problem is compounded because the victims have Uni degrees and non-regional accents, so they're clearly bo-boes throwing their weight about and drive out the `disadvantaged'.
Nope, that is a well-known bias that wealthy working people are de facto more intelligent.
"...it does so with basically a 0% chance of my screwing something up, or not understanding what is happening."

This, to me, is exactly what is wrong with them. They are teaching people complacency, to be consumers and not have any involvement. Ironically, it's much like how TV used to be before the emergence of the internet and PVRs forced it to change - people have to accept what's handed down to them and discovering features, experimenting and DIY is discouraged if not actively worked against. A classic example is google's steady elimination of anything resembling user choice - if you want something of theirs to work a way other than their imposed default, your options shrink practically every month, as does your privacy.

People who are "scared of computers" are a rapidly dying breed, and designing a product to appeal to them seems counterintuitive compared to encouraging emerging users to experiment, hack and learn.

The best thing about chromebooks is that they can be turned into a cheap low-end linux system.

I considered buying a netbook at one time (decided against it, but after some thought); I've never seriously considered a chromebook appropriate for my own use in its intended use case, and only briefly before discarding the idea as something to root and install linux onto.
That depends (as one commenter hinted to) on the level of service that the cloud services provider is providing.

If they are providing essentially a bare machine or VPS, then clearly they shouldn't have editorial control over your blog that happens to be hosted on the hardware. But when it gets to more managed services I think the issue is blurred.

- Scenario 1: hire a VPS, set up a mail server on it, send emails that your host doesn't want you sending. - I'd say there's nothing they should be able to do here.
- Scenario 2: using a scalable email service (like Amazon SES?) to send emails that the host doesn't like. - I'm much less sure about this.
DHH on 37Signals employees benefit package
I don't think Rust is such a shining example of a solid language in this area, at least not yet. For example: http://stackoverflow.com/a/20704252/626867
Very nice. Whatever your views on JS are this is an impressive project.
> the lower level (as in closer to infrastructure) the service provided the higher level the threshold for editorial interference should be

That was my instinct too, but I see no real reason why we should expect that to be the case. We've grown up with the idea that servers are generally managed by reasonably "legit" entities. Now that it's trivial to sign up for a VPS, we probably have to expect providers to pay more attention to what goes on on their machines. This is thought provoking, for me anyway.
I couldnt hang out anywhere, I wall polling HN with F5
> businesses will have to increase production, and hire more workers to do so.

they will have to pay the workers more to entice them in, and provide better working conditions.

this will generate more work, and higher consumption.

The problem is, noone has tried to see the complete picture by adding up these effects. The net effect is probably negative, unless this is introduced all over the world simultaneously.

Businesses will hire more people and pay them more => prices will go up, purchasing power for domestic products will go down (i.e. the same income will afford fewer domestic products). Imports will go up because those products will be cheaper than before in comparison. Exports will go down for the same reason.

Therefore, a large part of the expected higher consumption will go to imports / foreign profits. Due to reduced exports, domestic production will go down instead of up. Since jobs cost more now, there will be even fewer of them than expected.

Overall, countries which introduce this, will suffer.
I ended up being productive - Started a new book (https://leanpub.com/jsoddities) and wrote some 20% of it while HN was down. Far more effective than my noprocrast
How about the GPS inside Android/iPhone?
did not think of that!

might be interesting to see how that stacks up against the other idea thread.
Eating nuts caused tooth decay in hunter-gatherers
A monster, a rat with a key, a dark room, and calculus
Multiple sites makes sense for more than that. Different places on the globe are good for different sorts of launches. Vandenberg's better for polar launches, Canaveral is better for launches that are more equatorial in nature.
www.hnsearch.com is down itself.
I honestly didn't realize how much time I spend on here until yesterday. It was more than a little disconcerting.

I spent a lot of my time reading up on Julia, and a little time working on a website.
If we can have an increasing GDP while most of America experiences stagnation (as with the recent recovery) who's to say we can't have decreasing GDP coupled with improving quality of life? (at least for a short period) As you point out, machines are doing far more of the work that workers once did.

Another policy of FDR's New Deal was the creation of the 8 hour day (many people still worked 12-14 hour days until then: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_Day#United_States). Perhaps reduced hours allowed more laborers to move into the workforce, and could be a more competitive and cheap way of supporting a broad middle class.
Exactly. If it was libellous, then DO do need to protect themselves. However I felt that blog post was genuine, on first impression of reading it, and I think there was enough evidence that it may actually be true that DO should not have been anywhere near as quick to take it down, perhaps they should have investigated it more.

That is, if the reason for taking it down was entirely to protect themselves legally. From what I've read, it's hinted that this might not be to protect themselves, but might be more down to them just wanting it gone.
It is just a language well-suited for teaching.
/r/learnprogramming and /r/programming
No people actually fired => demagogy.
"Shouldn't be allowed" is a bit strong. It is not unreasonable to remove questionable content when you are made aware of it; if only to protect the business from threat of legal action. It becomes policing when a website has to actively check up on its customers which places an unfair burden.
twitter. lots and lots of twitter.
That sentence in itself is an assumption.

There appears to be an experiment with moderately succesful results. Let's expand the experiment and see where the results take us. We could always stop if we don't like future results.
We'll have less wealth created, but more people will be willing to spend money consuming it. All that means is prices will go up.

Your Keynesian story may eventually play out - the real value of the BI might be inflated away, resulting in people going back to work. Perhaps that will completely mitigate the problem, or perhaps it will merely result in a new equilibrium which only hax 0 < X% < 9% fewer people working. But why create the problem in the first place?

If 100 people produce 10 apples each, you have 1000 apples. If 9 of them quit, you have only 910 apples.
IRC is just a protocol, like HTTP.
if i was given free upvotes, i would not just sit around and do nothing, i would upvote this article so much more!
There's a list of other communities at a spoof site I made a while back: http://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com
Quite. The idea that Google is "behind" Go is mistaken. The situation is that some people inside Google, some of them quite well-known and influential, are behind Go. There are also people not inside Google who are behind Go, and people who are inside Google who aren't keen on Go.

Therefore, Go is certainly not in the same position as things like Chrome or Android, where the company as a whole has a stake in their success.
All of those are criminal offences in their own right though - while clearly inept in your situation, the police don't require new powers to arrest someone for entering your house without permission, throwing bricks through windows, or vandalising power supplies.
This is a nice idea, and well executed. Well done! :)
20% in a day - sounds more like a pamphlet to me :)
ISRO scientists were doing an AMA on r/india
In the U.S., there is the concept of "false light", which is similar to defamation, except that the plaintiff can claim damages even if the implication is true.

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

A classic case (though for some reason, I haven't been able to find it through Googling), according to my law professor, involved Time LIFE Magazine (or perhaps one of its peers), which had a photograph of a cowboy, and the silhouette, perhaps it was the back of his saddle, appeared to imply that the man was exposing his member.

The photo was unaltered and thus, true, but the cowboy was able to claim damages. Again, I'm citing from memory but haven't been able to find the case via web searches (it's likely to have happened decades ago, though).

Since the U.S. is more permissive on the issue of libel than most countries, I imagine the concept of "false light", or something similar to it, exists in most countries.
my favourite line:

‘Poverty is fundamentally about a lack of cash. It's not about stupidity,’ author Joseph Hanlon remarks. ‘You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you have no boots.’
Or Sun Microsystems in 1996.
It's very cheap and very fast - ideal for testing your deployment scripts. I would never run a live service from there however. (you can't even do realistic HA on their service without involving some third-party for being the front-end)
> The old joke: "Don't vote, it only encourages them"

Problem is: if you don't vote, you're certain not to get the candidate you want. You're basically accepting their reign.

Better to stubbornly vote for a small candidate who doesn't really have a chance. If enough people do that, he might accidentally get elected.
I spent more time hanging out in cesspools of villainy, like /b and the PhantasyTour Phish forum (http://phantasytour.com//phish/boards.cgi). But yeah, I'm really happy HN is back.
An anarchist critique of the reporting on the Snowden leaks
However, with 9 people free to quit making apples, the chances of one of them producing oranges increases.

I don't think we have good information on second and third order effects.
Am I the only one who sees Digital Ocean as acting ethically here?

This guy is a jerk. He harassed a guy, because the guy works at Google, into giving him his opinion about a semi-controversial topic in a private forum. Then he writes a blog hit-piece in which he explicitly identifies him and disparages him for the opinion he gave! I don't know if he has a legal right to do this, but you don't just do things like that. This Googler is not a spokesperson for the company. He's not in a public forum. He's just some guy who works at Google as a developer, who gave you his opinion "off the record", and you do something like that!? He could lose his job over this if somebody at Google PR overreacts. He may have a family, a mortgage, car payments, school debts, and without any reason, you decided to just screw him over. Don't do things like that!!!! Be nice!

All DigitalOcean asked him to do is to anonymize references to this Googler. This is the ethical move because this jerk didn't get the Googler's permission to have him "on the record". Depending on your jurisdiction, you are in a legal grey area anyway.
Read Von Mises!
Sneak Peek at Programmable Money
Demons: A short film about depression and suicide
#startups on freenode has the biggest HN user concentration
Not a traditional HN post, I'm aware, but seeing as depression (in particular) is covered a lot here I thought some of you might find it interesting.

Long and short, inspired by a blog post of the same name, my brother made this film after a friend of his went to take his own life in a place near to them that so many others have done the same. A year later they revisited the spot and talked about what happened.

He stuck it online yesterday and so many people have reached out to say thank you and talk about their own demons, I figured it was worth a share.
Gooogle are being totally dishonest and misleading in their use of reCAPTCHA to digitize house numbers.

"reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows."

"Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books."

They are lying and they are not benefiting the public interest - which is what reCAPTCHA relies on - they are only benefiting their company and their own shareholders.
The problem with the UK is that it now has 3 major conservative parties.

But aren't there smaller parties you can vote for? And if there aren't any, surely you can start a new party? Find enough people who agree with you.
Marketing Warning: Don't Forget the Tablet
I'm not sure the fault lies with Orwell rather than with us.

Orwell showed us a world where rampant socialism, statism, lack of individual liberties, twisting of language for political means, and widespread unaccountable surveillance led to a horrific dystopia. People read the book and people agreed that it was something best to be avoided. But at every opportunity people have flinched away from the example of 1984. People have said "oh, but this socialism is the good kind, it's different", they said "this statism isn't that kind of statistm", and "it's only a small limitation of liberty in exchange for valuable improvements in safety", and "these changes to language are in service to a greater good", and so on, and so on. Then we get to widespread, unaccountable surveillance by the state and suddenly everyone starts shouting about 1984 and wondering how things could possibly have gotten so bad without anyone noticing.

Lots of people have been noticing, but even more people have been ignoring, or excusing.
Blair and Brown in the UK demonstrated the truth of this quote and we and our descendants here will continue to pay the price for generations to come.

Clearly I'm a very bad person because if I were to suddenly receive a significant cash injection I'd lay down tools and disport myself with books, music and a spot of travel. Everyone to his or her own. However it's good to know that the rest of humanity are mostly above this kind of thing.
Advanced Debugging Techniques in JavaScript - Part 1
Via the W3 spec:

> The request has succeeded. The information returned with the response is dependent on the method used in the request, for example:

Is a query that turns up no documents when there is indeed no documents a success? I would argue yes, as the search service executed the query accurately...in fact, if the query turned up documents when it shouldn't have, that would probably be a problem...

But the way the 404 is worded, it would also fulfill the meaning of "no results".

> The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.
I searched google for "hacker news similar sites" and ended up on "http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/"
FWIW, I would be interested in the old raster versions! Think you could put them on a public Dropbox folder or something? Thanks in advance for any help!
Most of America has not experienced stagnation. They have experienced a consistent increase in employment compensation and a consistent increase in consumption.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=qG0

The only "stagnation" that has occurred has been a shift in compensation from taxable wages to untaxed non-wage benefits.

The fundamental problem is that with a drop in labor we will have fewer goods and services. No matter how you slice it, that's a drop in (real, not necessarily nominal) consumption.
There's not really a good metric of "OSM quality" yet.

The only things I can suggest are:

- issues: number reported, number closed, diversity of reporters and closers - on the basis that if lots ofpeople are reporting issues, that means "many eyes make all bugs shallow" might be working. If lots of people are closing them, then someone is actually paying some attention.

- tag diversity. Human mappers tend to actually use a fairly wide variety of tags for points of interest.

- some measure of how much the data that has been imported from, say, government public domain GIS datasets, has been modified.

- last update

- presence of house/building names and numbers

There's a bunch of similar stuff up at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance
That's why I tried to stop caring about the [current] web and embraced the future by reading mailing list or irc channels of actual projects. Going close to where things actually happens, raw.
It's not noise though. For me a smartwatch would replace a radio. With a radio you can easily pass a handful of messages back and forth every minute with low overhead, but with a smartphone that many messages becomes a burden. With a smart watch it's not a burden.
I spent a short amount of time there and it seemed to be rather spoilt by a contingent of insane and simply unpleasant people. Perhaps I just chose the wrong day.
5000+ words a day isn't too difficult, really. Plus JS Oddities isn't going to be a very big book - about 20+ examples of rather crazy JS code and explanations
A couple questions about the virtual agent if you're inclined to answer.

How did you choose that company? How much does it cost? Can she also do phone support or only email?
> Stealing and publishing documents from the FBI didn't seem to have much of an impact either

If I recall correctly, the fall out conveniently drowned in noise from the Watergate affair.

Watergate was silly childs play compared to the COINTELPRO revelations though.
IRC is great. Need help with an advanced math problem (or a basic one)? Try #math on freenode. Need help with an esoteric Python problem (or a basic one)? Try #python on freenode. Need help with ${anything_else}? Try #${anything_else} on freenode. Etc. (If there isn't a freenode channel for your topic, then Googling for "topic IRC channel" will usually turn up something on some other IRC network.)

I can't think of any other tool which solves the same problem as IRC, so it seems doubtful that IRC will be joining the ranks of the dearly departed anytime soon.
It doesn't matter if they were ethical or not, what they did is not right. They are not law enforcement. If everybody would be allowed to enforce the law, then I would be free to shoot you in the head just because you made a negative comment about my cat, because I feel that's ethical.
"duivenmelker" in English (at least British English) would be "pigeon fancier".

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/pigeon-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_fancier
So is gopher.
I can think of such people. In fact, i don't think any of the really excellent people i've worked with blog, or spend much time in forums, or use Twitter for technical stuff. Some are involved with local meetups. The rest are just getting on with things.

On the other hand, i routinely come across blog posts or HN comments by people who clearly have much less expertise than them.
WordPress is not easy, and that's OK
160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
The only way to stop climate change now may be revolution
Bruce Schneier: I've Joined Co3 Systems
Just because "NullObject pattern" ends with "pattern" doesn't mean that it's usually a good idea.
The Axis Of Evil
I do voluntary work with the sort of kids this law has been designed to target - the ones who walk around a council estate causing trouble, because there's nowhere for them to go but home, where they can look forward to crowded houses and parents who are high.

There are two approaches to dealing with that problem. The first is laws like this, which allow the police to prosecute them simply for walking the streets in a group, and set them up for life with a criminal record. That will inevitably lead to worse crimes in the future as they find themselves unable to work because of that record.

Alternatively the government could stop cutting funding for organisations that try to provide a place where they can go and be children without causing others trouble. Youth centres are shutting down due to a lack of funding - the one I volunteer at only functions because its funded by a local church, and even then it only just scrapes by.

Honestly, I don't really know where I'm going with this, other than needing to rant about the fucked up approach this government is taking with their "Big Society", carefully focused on making sure the poor are criminalised, and the rich don't have to worry about supporting them.
Why we launched on both iOS and Android, and you should too
I spent time reading Medium.
... and protocols never truly die? Like Gopher?
As I said the potential is worse, likely far worse, but right now it's not quite there (maybe?).

Back in the worst days with Hoover they were actively targeting specific political activists and basically running black ops against them. We haven't reached that stage with NSA, as far as I can tell, though the potential is certainly there.

Maybe you misinterpreted what I said, it shouldn't be an excuse to wait until things get worse before taking action. The fact that the potential is there should be enough.