skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>For example, answering "What is the capital of Israel" and/or "what is the capital of Palestine" really depends on both who is asking and who is answering.

Wow, did you just ever open a can of worms.

Legally speaking, the capital of Israel is Jerusalem, and the capital of Palestine is currently Ramallah. These are also the practical capitals, in the sense of these cities containing their respective national governments and institutions.

Things only get thorny when you start trying to ask about what capitals are recognized by other countries. Then you start getting nonsense answers, like the capital of Israel being in Tel-Aviv (then why isn't the Knesset there?) and the capital of Palestine being nonexistent due to occupation (then where does the Palestinian Authority govern from?).

For legal and practical purposes, there are answers to these questions. People are just embarrassed to contradict their own politics by speaking these answers aloud. So if we're talking about knowledge extraction, if I were Google, I would give the legal and practical answers. Telling someone the capital of Israel is in Tel-Aviv may be politically correct in some places, but it won't get them to the state office they need to visit.

Anyway, consider me to be wearing my flame-proof suit.
This map is confusing; it uses three shades of blue, two of which represent land and one of which represents water. I had to stare at both the key and an ordinary map of Ukraine for a minute in order to process what I was seeing.
This sounds excellent, I can't believe I never tried it yet! Of course, this should be part of core Android, but I guess there is no hope for that (given that Google makes its dough on advertising).
Judging by the article, beach is only accessible through private road, dude bought the property containing the road and closed the road. Perfectly within his rights. And this rhetoric about "billionaire putting a strain on a state agency" is laughable.
Makin' Mazes
> If a process doesn't respond reasonably to SIGTERM, then you should consider removing it from your filesystem.

What's reasonably? MySQL/InnoDB will start consolidating the journal and buffer pool in preparation for a shutdown. On machines with a large amount of RAM allocated to the buffer pool that will take quite some time. Is that still reasonable?
Some work I was doing over the summer indicates that the optimal datatype depends on the algorithm you're using.

qsort() can get 15% better performance with uint64_ts than uint32_ts (sorting identical arrays of 8 bit numbers represented differently).
On the other hand, a naive bubble sort implementation was managing 5% better performance with 16 bit datatypes over any of the others.

If you start measuring energy usage as well, it becomes even stranger - using a different datatype can make it run 5% faster, while using 10%+ less energy (or in the qsort() case, take less time, but use more energy).
It's not a belief, it's just hope. Besides, demonstrations are not their goal. And if they will feel that something is seriously wrong, no laws will stop them from demonstrating anyway, as proved by the current events. And Germany can afford to have such strict laws, because it is little to protest for in Germany, so the protests tend to be more local and relevant to some minority more than the whole population, so getting them out of certain parts I think is reasonable. If German government would be doing something that 90% of population would strongly oppose, I'm pretty sure nobody would care of such laws when half million people come to the forbidden area.
Does this mean that because the previous statement, "Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA
Patriot Act," is missing, that they have received at least one order?
HN blocked in China
I've had troubled accessing HN from Shenzhen, China recently. Any other HNers in China had similar problems?
If he is a friend just be honest.

If you think it is a genuinely good idea then say.
Maybe offer to be his goto. So when he has issues, or just needs to talk about something related to the project he can come to you.
I have about 10 apps that I refuse to update, because they want some new permissions that I'm not willing to grant them. It is sometimes hard to find apps that respect your privacy and don't request absurd permissions.
Programming Today: To IDE or Not To IDE?
Features should be community-driven. Nest[1] uses a voting system for feature focus. I've mocked-up a system[2] that extends the concept a little further, melding abilities from StackExchange, reddit, and Wikipedia.

Rather than voting on a single feature (like Nest offers), every idea's benefits and drawbacks are openly discussed in a moderated* fashion. The debate can include a detailed break-down of costs, allowing budgetary information to influence discourse and direction.

Also, imagine a hypothesis section wherein guesstimated outcomes are recorded, which can be compared with what actually happened.

[1]: https://community.nest.com/community/product-suggestions

[2]: http://davidjarvis.ca/world-politics/

*Groupthink is mitigated by randomly selecting moderators from the entire population, who are then empowered for a random interval of time. All users are anonymous.
I think many systems commercial and otherwise will be open to exploitation. I don't necessarily object to the NSA or another government's intel service hunting those bugs either to protect against or to exploit. I do object overall to the creation of exploits or the weakening of systems.

In the absence of a perfect system of governance I feel we should default to not giving unspeakable power to a concentrated few. The slides on the tools were leaked out of a for-profit firm that contracts for the NSA, next the tools themselves like music industry cohort MediaDefender[0] had happen to them? Or even worse a leak of a database the tools sift through like the Assad regime's BlueCoat[1] logs on political/sexual/religious targets?

Another US firm Palantir was itself tangled in a scheme Glenn Greenwald reported pre-Snowden regarding the targeting of political activists via a solicitation of work through Hunton & Williams made by the US Chamber of Commerce[2]. I can't trust the US intel community as far as I can toss it when conflicts of interest are apparent at every level of clearance given to contractors. So I will probably frown upon most alphabet boys exploitation of capabilities.

[0] http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3819529/Mediadefender_-_ANTI_...

[1] http://bluesmote.com/

[2] http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/
I just read the whole criminal complaint (http://www.scribd.com/doc/202555785/United-States-vs-Charles...) and I don't believe the blockchain is mentioned a single time. Most of the investigation was based on email exchanges between the defendants and inspection of the Silk Road's messaging system.
Not sure if this is "hacker news" relevant - but I've seen this brought up enough times, that when its stated its usually nothing more than an attention grab to capitalize on the "1% vs 99%" media trend and the fact that the average joe won't actually look into how NFL financials actually works.

Simply put the NFL (the league) doesn't actually make any profits. It simply collects all the money that the entire organization makes (ticket sales, tv deals, etc), pays its own bills, and whatever is left, is split evenly to the owners of the 32 teams - which then the individual owners have the liability of paying taxes for. So all that money they do make is eventually taxed, just not by the NFL (the league).

A quick Google can clear that up, but this "news site" is more interested in spreading half truths (like using the term "revenue-rich"). Whatever you can do to get page views, I suppose.
uhh... correct me if i am wrong, but the PV of an annuity is generally NOT equal to X where the annuity pays N payments of X/N

So when they are saying "40 payments of $25 mil" that doesn't mean that $1B is the PV of said annuity. (I might have misunderstood you though)
...and this is why not to install the facebook app.

Try Tinfoil: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...

CyanogenMod with Privacy Guard also works, but facebook's app is stupid bloatware anyway.
It would be way, way, worse than a smell. It'd be a clear-the-room-this-sh*t-is-baad type of situation. At least in my book, but I can be somewhat delicate in my sensitivities sometimes. :)

And yes, of course it's true that C APIs use explicit lengths because they're nowhere to be found at run-time. We didn't all just miss that and add an extra argument for fun.
Foreigners here, and Bush junior immediately came to mind. It isn't a straight parallel, but the pork was there, and the cronies were paid.
So I'm guessing that if it's a nanoelectrical FSM, you have to hook it up to some kind of nanoelectrical RAM to get a "real" computer, in the sense of a limited-tape Turing Machine?
Nifty! But most of the effects from 'Constraints' onward aren't working as expected in FF/26.0 (OSX). (They are doing interestingly useful-as-described things in Chrome.)
Uhm, the Chrome graphs show down spikes on weekends too.
This sort of crap is the reason I'm using Tinfoil for Facebook [1].

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...
It used to be, called App Ops. It was in for (one?) point release before google promptly withdrew it again after realising that giving people tools to protect their privacy goes against their mission.
Are you sure that you have an iPhone?
How to use MandrillApp when sending mails with MAMP Pro
Writing a command line wrapper should be relatively simple for capsicum. Designing the interface might need some work. I think the idea mainly has been to get code to sandbox itself but I can see a use case.
Not in China now, but this nice website seems to prove you right:

http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=news.ycombinator.com
But not all over Europe people can get into prison for 15 years :)

And especially they wouldn't be:
1. kidnaped;
2. beaten up;
3. found dead somewhere in a forrest, miles out of the city
And after that police states - death occurred due freezing, and has nothing to do with kidnaping :)
Or perhaps the NSA know China's doing in it, on account of how effectively they have infiltrated huawei?
"I was just following orders" is a discredited defense in war crime trials.
The iphone has had fine-grained privacy before App Ops was released and then removed, and I also think before CyanogenMod had Privacy Guard. One of the few good things about the platform.
A version number is just an arbitrary point in time, in the case of SPDY, with a certain feature set. Just because SPDY/2 doesn't support everything SPDY/3 supports doesn't mean it's unstable.

This is why I like date-based version numbering, such as Ubuntu 13.10 or C++11.
There are countless examples (your list is great). Here are some more people I instantly thought of.

Gabe Newell.

John Carmack. While he doesn't have the reputation of being a super-nice person, he certainly doesn't come off as being an arrogant dick.

Marc Andreessen. Similarly to Carmack, doesn't necessarily have the reputation for being super-nice, but certainly isn't a dick.

Mendel Rosenblum (Diane Greene's cofounder).

Max Levchin.

There are countless others, really. People in these positions typically have to make some really tough choices (should I fire Bob?) and you can't reach any significant level of success without leaving a trail of disgruntled people behind you. Being forced to make choices that leave some people unhappy isn't the same as being dick, though it might look that way from afar.
The US seems to have this quite backwards. They should be identifiers NOT authentictors although it is always likely to be slightly messy as some people won't have one and others may end up with multiple but having multiple people with the same number sounds pretty wrong.
It is incorrect.

Take SSE2 instructions as an example (Every X64 processor supports these, the old x87 FPU has been obsolete for over 10 years). You can either calculate 4 floats per instruction or 2 doubles per instruction. Similar considerations also apply to ARM.

Also even if you might want to use doubles as intermediate representation you still might wish to use floats as storage. E.g read from float, convert into double, calculate stuff, write back a float.
The Perils of Social Media
Asking for SMS (read/send) permissions is a growing trend among mobile apps (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Google Hangouts…).

Most of the time, they're here to make the app slightly more useful to the end user. But at the same time, you're potentially saying "yes" to a company who might, one day, use your most personal info for bleaker purposes.

It's thus something I've always been fighting against (at least at a personal level): I've stuck to the older, non-requiring-SMS-permissions version of these apps until I could upgrade to a version of Android with App Ops, then Cyanogen.

If SMS permissions is where you draw the line regarding your privacy, either run a version of Android with App Ops, or Cyanogen with Privacy Guard.

I find it sad that companies still think most users value simplicity over privacy.
I don't think I've ever even tried to implement a login page at a hackathon. I just pretend that every user is authed and go to work on the cool stuff that I'll actually demo.

Since it takes up valuable time to show off "auxiliary" pages like account setup, I think it's okay to just skip 'em. Most people won't mind, as it's well understood that hackathon projects are not ready for prime-time.
Love k-means? Run it on your spreadsheets with graf.ly
SPDY version numbers will increasing clock up, HTTP/2.0 numbers are likely to be far more less frequent
I once talked to CTO of a quite popular app and he mentioned that he finds it best to ask for all permissions you might need upfront (on first install), even if you don't need them yet. Adding them in upgrades later results in lots of customer support questions (and negative reviews).

It is also telling that OP is bothered by "read your messages" permission but doesn't seem to mind "record audio, take pictures and videos" just below it. Just because it is not new?
Could this be one of the reasons web apps get traction on Android?
Tips on how you should run your first conference
Re: your ARM comment - had you noticed who wrote the article?
Technique was already covered in a student paper last year: https://www.os3.nl/_media/2012-2013/courses/rp1/p22_report.p...
I find it sad that most users value simplicity over privacy.
Conversely, IE 10, Safari, and Opera actually go up on the weekend.
The code in the article is about optimisation, in which case there should always be a slow reference implementation. Never try to write highly optimised code on the first go: make it work, make it correct, then make it fast.

Also, these aren't unit tests; they're property tests.
I experienced the inner monologue you describe for several years. It haunted my dreams when working with Ruby. But one day a rhetorical thought suddenly dawned on me that has since changed my perspective quite dramatically...

"...if I'm being incessantly bothered by what I perceive as the nagging inefficiencies of some programming language's implementation, maybe I'm not thinking about or relating to programming languages (in the large) in the way I should be..."

If all programming languages are merely tools to communicate instructions to a computer, then why is human language not merely viewed by everyone as a means to an end as well? Surely, most would agree that language is more than simply an ends to a mean, and that language does far more than simply transmit information between parties. If efficiency, lack of ambiguity, etc., were the paramount goals of human language, surely formal logic, or perhaps even a programming language for interpersonal communication would be more fitting than natural language!

So why do we insist on communicating with each other with what is often such an abstract and ambiguity filled medium?

I'll let wikipedia elaborate on my behalf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature

tldr; it is trivial, even natural for an literate individual with the proper context to understand concepts in language that seemingly transcend the words themselves. These notions would be (and are) exceedingly difficult to formalize, and any formal expression of these ideas would cause exponential growth of the output.

Ever try explaining a joke to someone who didn't "get it"? It takes a lot more "space" to convey the same sentiment than to someone who "got it".

So what has this crazy rant have to do with anything? Well, aside from revealing I am a complete nerd, it speaks to my approach to software engineering today.

We have to let go of the machine if we ever want to really move the state of the art forward.

There are an infinitude of expressible ideas, but lacking the proper medium to abstract the expression of these ideas formally (like natural language and our brains do, well, naturally) we will never get a chance to find out what we don't know!

"We're doing it wrong" is not exactly the sentiment I'm trying to express, but it's sorta that. Maybe.

Hope this comment made any sense. :) It's 4 AM after all.
I feel like some sort of manual component to two-factor authentication is the whole point (a clickable link, copy+paste, or remembering a 4 digit number).

Besides that, two factor is a bit of a joke in an app (on your phone) that caches your password, and then sends a message (to your phone) which is automatically read and accepted, before allowing you to login. What exactly are we achieving here in terms of security? Every 30 days the app authenticates itself with no user intervention.

It would be much more secure to just force a password login.
How does Uber compare to Mechanical Turk in this regard?
Would Amazon (or a requester?!) be liable for accidents happening to (or caused by) turkers while they are working on a request?
You can control the permissions of each apps with AppOps [1]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.slvn.appops
For many financial applications, you know precisely in advance how many decimal points you need to be able to accommodate. E.g. for UK VAT calculations, you are never required to work it out to more than four decimal points (and can then round to 3).

I sort-of agree with you, in that it is easy to get bitten, and that if people have a dynamic integer type available on their platform that's probably safest. If the choice is between using integers for fixed point vs. using double's though, I'd go for the fixed point any day.
The parts where the heaviest protests take place correlate with the pre-WW II Polish borders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curzon_Line

Being from Poland I wish our politicians tried to use this situation as an opportunity to re-annex western part of Ukraine. Maybe not entire half of it, but f.eg. Lvov used to be a beautiful Polish city before the war.
Indeed. In fact, IE10 and IE11 show mild weekend/Sunday dips, but IE7/IE8/IE9 show severe dips, and Chrome and Firefox noticeable Sunday dips, too.

Since these are percentages, someone must be surging on weekends/Sundays... and that does appear to be the case for Safari and Opera. Didn't expect that, myself.
I hope you enjoy cache misses ;)
This goes into more detail on pointers than some tutorials on C++, pointers are bread and butter in C.

The article should have given a link to:

http://cdecl.org

The last time I visited that site I ended up crossed-eyed, incontinent and speaking in DEC-PDP8 assembly for several days.
I'm not surprised - HN often ends up with posts or comments which are outspoken against Chinese government policy.

Also, it will probably boost their engineering productivity by 10%.
I'm not sure someone who says "If that fits your pace, that's great, but that would have driven me nuts last time I was driving cross-country" is really looking to be on a particular side of history.
Add Hangouts to the discussion. They incorporated SMS into the app, but the implementation doesn't look complete/polished, let alone the app. So, it doesn't provide me an alternative to the OEM provided messaging app, and at the same time they are accessing my SMS messages.

I personally don't use Facebook on phone now, but I would recommend using a third-party app for accessing Facebook on android. I have used Friendcaster, Fast and Seesmic before and found them pretty decent.
I have often wished for this. If you can pass a pointer to free() and it frees the previous allocation, it must "know" how big it was, so why is there no way to ask it? You can obviously stash it yourself at malloc() time in a lookup table, but still.
In an application at work where we deal with mapping and geo-coordinate systems and stuff we frequently all sorts of fun little bugs because a point on the map doesn't know whether it's in geographic coordinates or in the current transformation system or in screen coordinates. They all use the same class and can be freely mixed. Alas, my suggestion of using different types to encode different coordinate systems was more or less ignored (too much effort cleaning up a 15 years old codebase).
Managing large codebase is nothing to do with typed property. Untyped languages just give you more freedom (see lambda calculus) but you can shoot yourself if you are not ready to use it.
>If you're going that fast, you'll have to stop every 1-2h to refuel in just about any car

Yeah, no. No way in hell, actually. You think driving 150-200 for 2 hours would drain a 70-80 Liter gas tank? I drive 50 minutes to work each day going that fast, I have an 80 Liter tank and I have to stop for gas once every 5 business days. You can calculate yourself that this equals to a "little" more than 2 hours of net driving time.
All JS on the web is open-source even if you don't want this :).
To be consistent with this logic, most of California should be returned to Mexico.

It was the treaty that gave California to the US, so not really.
I don't see how. They're accessing data on your phone, you aren't exactly cracking their databases and modifying stuff.
And he wrote a Collection of Puzzle games that work across different operating systems including Android: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

I would say Simon Tatham definitely has good experience in programming.
I believe most users seem to value simplicity over privacy, but actually do care about privacy. What's sad is that they don't get vocal enough about it until private information gets exposed.
Ask HN: Is jQuery really awful for Single Page Apps?
This is what I see when I read the introduction to backbone.js

When working on a web application that involves a
lot of JavaScript, one of the first things
you learn is to stop tying your data to the DOM. It's
all too easy to create JavaScript
applications that end up as tangled piles of jQuery
selectors and callbacks, all trying frantically to keep
data in sync between the HTML UI, your JavaScript logic,
and the database on your server. For rich client-side
applications, a more structured approach is often
helpful.

Is this really justified? Meaning is learning and writing more javascript code a solution to the potential problem highlighted in that paragraph? I am not convinced because I can do so much more in my head using jQuery nor have I experienced a great deal of difficulty for building Single Page Applications with a LAMP backend.