skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> not to mention the fall of the Soviet Union liberating lots of countries in no small part due to America and it's allies fight against communism.

Was it though? I've heard that repeated so often. If it was how come it was such a surprise to all the Sovietologists at the time?

The thing is, those that worked for the CIA thought they won because their spies did this and that. Those working for the Dept of State thought they won because this and that diplomatic trick. Those in Congress throughout the years thought they won because they enacted these economic sanctions and so they killed the "Bear".

The truth is probably that it would have collapsed with or without the help of anyone from outside.

So not sure if US should be thanked for liberating Latvia, Georgia and Poland , ironically, Soviet Union's polices and base system setup should be thanked because it was so rotten at the core.

But another thing is interesting, and it shows in your post. This thing is very dangerous and it is the very thing that many hate US for -- exceptionalism. It shows implicitly in your comment and it is often assumed in political debate. It is this idea that US is special in some objective sense. That it doesn't have to abide by rules. It shouldn't be judged by same criteria as everyone else.

Equating it to the Roman Empire. Attributing it wondeful qualities of slaying a the great Satan of Communism and so on.

> Is the US perfect? Far from it, but the implication that the US is some pox on the world is just as absurd.

It is good to find out if people judge US based on comparing it to other countries or to the propaganda image it presents of itself. I find the disconnect and hypocrisy that shows in in the latter is one reason people might dislike US.

In other words, it is because it tells others how "perfect" it is, that imperfections and transgressions that are excusable for other countries become very noticeably with US. Like say torture. Ok, Somalian government chops children's arms off say if they don't want to convert or something like that. It would not shock too many people to learn that for example. The fact that US engaged and probably still does engage in torture (even thought they've redefined it as whatever enhanced interrogations something) is very shocking and disturbing vis-a-vis the "we are the great human rights champions of the world" type proclamations.

> And after all the characters rattle off a long list of things the Romans have done, and no one seems to want to hate the Romans anymore, Reg says

I do. They raided and conquered the territory of my country, killed and destroyed many villages. Destroyed local culture and language and imposed theirs. It is easy to look back and say well ok, Romans turned out pretty ok. We had roads and wheels. How do we know that not having Romans invade would have turned out? Maybe it would have been even better? We can't quite run that experiment to check.

Anyway this comparison with the Roman Empire doesn't quite work well for me on multiple levels, as you can see, sorry ;-)
To further your point, most people have probably heard this one already regarding Hunter S. Thompson.

> While working, he used a typewriter to copy F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms in order to learn about the writing styles of the authors.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson#Early_journa...
OS X does have a "secure empty trash" feature.

"Unlink" is a scary meaningless word for an average Joe. Probably has something to do with those Internet links he keeps hearing about.

People won't care about securely deleting their files unless they get burnt or they see someone get burnt on Fox News.
It's difficult to trace through Angular programs compared to say Express JS - express is a much cleaner framework than Angular which pollutes your HTML and JavaScript with lots of magic.

In the early days of Django the had a magic removal branch for this very reason; people who do not understand the framework will find it harder to learn.

This is just my experience. Maybe you are some sort of Angular savant who agrees with all the assumptions the authors made.

Haha, and your abstractions comment deliberately misses the point; of course we abstract things but you should use the simplest possible abstraction for the job. Angular is not that.
The average person sees a video game as care-free entertainment, not a dangerous compulsion.

If you want to make your business about manipulation of the customer, don't pretend to be morally pure. You are scum.
Chipolte's system is focused on food consumers or food consuming consumers. Its employees don't care because they can't. Care is not allowed. It slows down the machine. The question "what's good today?" has no meaning because the brown cardboard boxes from which today's ingredients emerged are indistinguishable from the brown cardboard boxes from which yesterday's emerged or tomorrow's will.

The general model of taking orders as people enter and preparing the food in parallel with their progress toward the cashier is sound. Fortunato's Pizza in downtown St. Pete uses it and it works well - despite allowing employees to act dignified instead forcing them to act Disneyfied.

The reason? Fortunato's isn't a franchise and the head of the production line at its nexus with the customer line was the owner himself. The face of the restaurant was its most seasoned veteran. He wrote the order down, and if it was pizza slices dropped them into the machine with the conveyor belt and heat elements himself. His greeting meant something and more importantly his customers' greetings meant something to him. They were his customers afterall.

http://www.fortunatositalianmarket.com/
Sheep, beef cattle and grain farming

Unsurprisingly, when you concatenate these three things together, including both wool farming and wheat, two of the country's major exports, it does rise higher than cotton farming. It's like saying if you put the US, Mexico, and Brazil together, they're bigger than Canada.

Also, from your second link: To understand what’s going on we need to look more closely at the numbers.There are currently about 720,000 head of cattle in Australia’s feedlots, out of a national cattle herd of 28.5 million. This represents about 3%. So, however you look at it, the vast majority of cattle in Australia are grass-fed. <- This is the finishing I was talking about earlier, and the statement that the vast majority of beef doesn't use grazing is wrong.
I also don't think it's fair to say the NFL runs the product.

You are quite mistaken. You have a source for that?

The NFL has revenues exceeding $4B which are nearly all "profit" (that is, revenues>opex). This cash flows through the league and then is distributed to the teams, who all of which run on essentially zero taxable profits. In other words, the revenues of the teams are the "profits" of the NFL non-profit. That is why there is no need for profits--because they distribute the cash out as 'expenditures'. The level of expednitures is aribitrary[1]...it is just set to maximize the flow of funds from the tax-exempt body with the least amount of tax.

At the lower level, the Teams are structured to run on nearly zero profits. This is why they can-not "afford" to build stadiums of pay taxes etc. This of course is also a highly-structure tax-avoidance setup, where inflated costs ("sweetheart" deals) are made with affiliate entities, which shelters the teams from paying taxes. The locations and corporate business structures of the "related entities" are likewise set up to be both opaque and tax-optimized in legal structure and jurisdicion.

The values of NFL franchises are staggering. Their debt-loads are also staggering. Hint: the banks would never lend them this money if they did not know more than your average punter. In part these investments are "ego-polishing" (like the America's cup), but there is quite a bit more money floating around the NFL, and this money is going to make rich people even richer...very little of it is being paid in tax.

[1] There is no "true sale" of the NFL non-profit's product; they take no risk in holding inventory. Their main purpose is to shield the teams from 2 things: (1) anti-trust; and (2) tax. To wit: a tax-exempt monopoly that makes no profits? Something should immediately trigger your sense of the non-obvious being present.
>I was very motivated when I got into the university. I was hoping we'd learn compilers, functional programming, low-level stuff, I was eager to learn everything. (..) but we didn't get to start actual programming until maybe third year (..) Most students didn't care either because they were there “to get the diploma”.

Are you living in Romania, by chance? Because the situation looks EXACTLY the same here.

I got into college hoping I would get some guidance learning something I find very interesting, but instead I get a big fucking joke.

Of course I tried to learn by self-teaching, but it was hard and I didn't even cover what a decent university would cover. And, like you said, the rest of the people are there just to get the diploma.

When I talked with a friend in Austria about how things are done here, he was shocked. You can't even call it an education. More like a big waste of time.

Right now I'm stuck in third and last year, with a dozen failed exams on subjects that god knows who placed them in the curriculum. I wanted to drop out in the first year, after seeing the horrors for myself, but there was nothing I could do about it.

Sucks so hard seeing all those years passing by and barely even learning anything from what I was eager to learn.
Did he edit his comment or something? I'm not seeing the reference.
That's odd. What laptop was that? There really shouldn't be any reason for all but newest ATI GPUs to not work out of box.

With nvidia the terrible stability and kernel upgrade hassles plus the need to externally install the drivers means it should be much uglier an experience than out of box ATI OSS drivers. Anyway as long as it works...
Join Firebase as Production Engineer #2
Do you want to make the process of building, deploying, and operating modern cloud applications radically easier? Join us and change the way software is built.

At Firebase, we're building the first realtime database-as-a-service. Every other database was designed to be downloaded and run on a business's own servers behind a firewall. Firebase is different -- it's a cloud service that's managed directly by the people who make it. By centralizing operations in the hands of our team, we can provide a superior experience for our developers, increased reliability, and massive efficiencies of scale. Our small team already manages the data for 10s of thousands of developers.

If you join Firebase, you will be the second engineer on a brand new team. You’ll be responsible for ensuring that Firebase is a trusted solution for mission-critical realtime applications. Your mandate will be to design and build any systems needed to make Firebase reliable, scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant. You’ll have the freedom to design everything — software, hardware, networks — from the ground up to serve high performance, realtime applications that are based on persistent network connections (ie. websockets, long-polling) and a synchronization paradigm.

As a Production Engineer, you’ll be tasked with:
(1) Architecting our networking and storage systems
(2) Ensuring the security of the Firebase service and all of our infrastructure
(3) Building monitoring, backup, and load testing tools
(4) Managing our automated build, CI, and deployment systems
(5) Provisioning new hardware and services
(6) Handling alerts as part of our 24x7 on-call rotation
(7) Advising the rest of the engineering team on best practices regarding security, reliability, and scaling

We need some smart, creative, and disciplined engineers to take Firebase to the next level. The ideal candidate would have:
(1) a keen attention to detail
(2) strong programming skills
(3) a solid working knowledge of Linux and networking
(4) a healthy paranoia for security concerns
(5) a drive to automate things

Why should you join Firebase?

First, we're one of the few small companies who are tackling tough computer science problems on a daily basis. We're in the business of handling the hard
technical aspects of real-time data sync so that our customers don't have to.

Second, we care a lot about cultivating a great work environment. This is our happy place. We're friendly people, we have a light-weight engineering process,
and we have a sweet 3 story penthouse office in SoMa.

Third, you can have a big impact here. We're a small team (but growing very quickly), and you'll have a big say in the direction of the company. And, since
we're serious about changing the way software is built, you could have a big impact on the way all software is made. We won't stop until the "refresh"
button is a thing of the past.

If you're interested, send us an email at jobs@firebase.com.

You can see more about our open positions here: https://www.firebase.com/jobs.html
I believe you're missing ac29's point. Android allows applications to distinguish between cached data and "regular/permanent" data. It also allows users to clear them separately.

Logically, the Apple ID / phone number mapping seems like it should fall under cached data (e.g. it can be regenerated and does need to be re-checked from time to time). If the iOS Messaging app properly implemented this distinction, users (or Apple) could clear this cached mapping without touching anyone's message history. Sadly, it sounds like it hasn't been implemented that way, so...
Nice work, just to tell you that font Montserrat looks really bad on Chrome / Win7 and Opera / Win7 (both latest)
Cannot agree more. This is the problem with Angular.
BOS-LHR is about 7 hour flight which equates to 20,000 gallons of fuel on 777. At $3/gallon, fuel is about $60,000.

If there are 250 people, round trip fuel price per passenger is $480.

Considering fuel is about 1/3rd of airline's operating expense, charging anything less than $1,000 for BOS-LHR roundtrip ticket is a money losing proposition, unless they can pack 350 people.
So, are you implying that anything involving potentially "dangerous" stuff like rape, suicide, violence, drinking, war etc is to be reserved only for "serious" academic research and be left out of test questions?

Imagine a test question "To one liter of a water/alcohol mixture in 1:1 ratio half a liter of water is added. What is the new alcohol-to-water ratio?". A former alcohol addict might be "triggered" by this question - but would you exclude it from a test?

Or, in a history test, avoid asking questions about the Afghanistan war because the kid's father lost a leg in Afghanistan?
I'm fairly certain that the kind of Americans who frequent HN can perform trivial arithmetic.
Actually you're right. Nice heads up, of course I meant no harm, I fixed it.
Just for the record I'm organizing a programming course for girls :)
I really liked that quote, because for me, it touches on what I find the most disturbing about the Obama election and presidency. It seemed, during the original campaign, that there was a critical mass of supporters who were entirely sucked into a vision of Obama as a miraculous figure, able to right all of the perceived wrongs of the Bush administration and heal all of our radial divisions. Stuff that no politician could ever really do, especially one with such a short record and so little experience. But nobody paid attention to that stuff, it was all just the "hope and change". And now they're all mad that this is mostly more of the same. It tends to make me rather cynical about politics here, and likely to ignore it entirely.

And what are the odds that I've just started a huge political argument...
Pixodrom.com now accepts Bitcoin payments for CAPTCHAs
Pixodrom.com now accepts Bitcoin payments for CAPTCHAs. $0.7 for 1000 correctly recognazed CAPTCHAs
Effectiveness of punishment vs Reward: a statistical analysis
Try https://blockchain.info/stats for stats from the past 24 hours. That site also has a whole lot of historical charts.
Why I like Java
This is something that has always made us a little nervous about updating here as well. Do you know whether the underlying data structures for repositories are generally maintained with both forward and backward compatibility?

Edit: For anyone else interested, I finally found the magic search term I never had before, which led me to this page about upgrading and compatibility:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UpgradingMercurial

and this page about potentially breaking changes where they do occur:

http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/UpgradeNotes

The short version is that older and newer Hg clients and servers and mostly interoperable in all directions, but with a few specific caveats that are worth reading before you upgrade anything. There is also the ability to explicitly change the underlying repository format for compatibility reasons if you need to.
While looking for high-performance SSD VPSs last year, I came across a bunch of disk performance benchmarks done on ServerBear and LowEndBox, which had RamNode as a clear winner. We've been very happy with RamNode so far.
Lumosity - http://www.lumosity.com/ - San Francisco, CA

We are looking for software engineers on the rails team and operations team (the team I'm on)!

Lumosity provides brain training games to improve the minds and lives of our 50 million users worldwide. Lumosity.com is one of the largest consumer rails apps and has a team of really smart engineers and product people building it.

If you're interested, please read the job descriptions and apply through jobvite here:

Senior Software Engineer (Rails): http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oW7PVfwx&s=SWE_HN

Senior Ops Engineer (DevOps): http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oX7PVfwy&s=DevOps_HN

We also have a bunch of other job positions at http://www.lumosity.com/jobs for engineers (iOS, Android, Flash) and others (UX, marketing, internationalization, product management). If you have any questions at all please email slieberman@lumoslabs.com and put "Hacker News" in the subject!
I think a lot of people aren't aware of this, but the US has helped (sometimes very directly) to overthrow quite a few democracies. Look at Iran, and their transition to the Shah; or Allende/Pinochet and Milton Friedman's experiments.
This works in all markets. I'm not saying you can beat a market leader with an underpowered product, but if you have a hypothesis that a faster search engine is what people want/need, just build the speed thing as your V1 and don't worry about optimizing result quality or scraping every data source. If speed truly is a differentiator, you will find out when you push out this barebones but fast search engine.

You may very well need a big product to win, but that doesn't mean you can't start getting feedback sooner with a small one.
No, it does not. It is good to be able to play around with the code, but to require someone to see the code working it is overkill.
As far as I am concerned, the gap in power between git and hg is much smaller than the gap in ease of use. The ease-of-use argument is only countered when there is real value to using the more frustrating alternative, and I'm not sure there is with git (besides the existence of GitHub, and the support of Linus Torvalds).
I like the concept. It's code commenting and analysis that's out of the way. There are many ways to look at and digest a piece of code. This is very helpful for learning.
Youre reading way way too much into what I said. You might do well to see the movie, it's a comedy. You know, earth humor.
This reads more like "a bunch of things I don't understand about the PostgreSQL query planner" than it does "tuning" anything. Pretty much everything you're describing is documented in The Fine Manual.

For example: Your understanding of TRUNCATE is incorrect. It does, in fact, release the disk space immediately (almost; see followup by 'jeffdavis). I just a couple of weeks ago used TRUNCATE to free up over 50 gbytes from one of my databases, and didn't need to VACUUM anything. One minute, the tables and their indexes weighed tens of gibibytes. Seconds later, they weighed tens of kibibytes. In between? "BEGIN; TRUNCATE TABLE foo; TRUNCATE TABLE bar; COMMIT;"
Anthropologist's take on Richard Stallman
OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO 'STRONG SOLDIER' BY ALLURA LUNA
Well sorry then. I know it is humor but it was presented here as part of a serious comment. So I took it seriously. Well disregard what I said then ;-)
Embedded in Academia: Use of Assertions
... and now we have fez: https://github.com/fez/fez

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7090479
> prisoners of war

These men are not prisoners of war. The United States cannot declare them as prisoners of war without gross legal ramifications.
"In Postgres, [TRUNCATE is] a DELETE without a where clause."

That's not true. Although it does obey some transactional semantics to avoid very strange things, it ultimately replaces the underlying files with one empty file.

So, TRUNCATE is an O(1) operation and there is no need to VACUUM after a TRUNCATE.

"Bitmap indexes are awesome, but good luck figuring out how to make them turn on."

They are enabled by default, and I've noticed that the planner is actually pretty aggressive about choosing them, so this one surprised me. There are cases where the planner can't choose a bitmap index scan plan, or maybe where it can but is just way off, but without an example it's hard to explain (or improve) the situation.
Suicide is one of the biggest causes of death, especially for men in that age range. Suicidality involves complex mental health. It is entirely possible for a person with suicidal thinking to be in treatment for that thinking but also continuing to study at university. Dropping references to suicide into minor assignments is a weird thing to do, especially if it's going to be framed with such odd choice of words.

Rape is similarly common and for some (but not all) victims is extremely distressing.

Can you understand why you don't just drop references to rape and suicide into a short assignment with no other context?
It's very nice for people to be able to just write code that appears to magically work, without any extra noise.

Unfortunately, it isn't always so nice for the guy who has to read it three years later and figure out what's going on. Sometimes there is a fine line between useful tools that reduce boilerplate and leaky abstractions that hide important details you're often going to need anyway. I suspect some of the features in Angular today will prove to be on the wrong side of that line, though to be fair it's hardly the only JS framework from the recent crop where that concern applies.
This probably doesn't help:

$ dig chat.freenode.net | grep 127
chat.freenode.net. 264 IN A 127.0.0.1
chat.freenode.net. 264 IN A 127.0.0.2
Where can I get a data dump of all HN comments?
I'm looking for a data dump of HN comments. It looks like Hacker News API[0] had one and disabled it. I haven't been able to find any other. It doesn't really need to be up to date -- anything in the last ~3 years would be fine.

[0] http://api.ihackernews.com/
^ logical fallacy
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/middle-ground
A sand groper is a small insect:
<p>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandgroper_%28insect%29
<p>
A "sand groper" is also slang for a Western Australian. As a "sand groper", I have never heard anyone use "type of" instead of "sort of" so I'm going to guess it was family specific.