skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NextDesk is an awesome company! I like their staff, product, and vision. There pretty expensive for most people tho. =/
That sounds somehow... familiar.
Please note the publication date of the post, in 2006. This was the privacy policy in place at the time. https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/archive/2005... I do not believe that I was unfair in describing either the letter or intent of their privacy policy.
I recently tried Keen.io for a project I'm working on, and it didn't work out - the metrics I was looking for were too complex (eg. the average lag between signup and the third time a user does a particular action) to do natively, and the suggestions for how to get that working in Keen (doing some calculations on the event data before sending out) I wasn't interested in.

Having said that, the guys at Keen were great to work with as I was sorting this out. The email I sent to their generic "contact us" address with some data modelling questions was answered promptly by one of the founders with solutions which, while I didn't like them, were interesting and would have worked out. They were also generous in letting me crash through the initial free quota while I was figuring out if the thing worked out for my use.

So while I didn't sign up as a paying customer with them (and I've stopped sending them events), it was among the most pleasant interactions I've had with a prospective analytics vendor in a long while - well done guys!
My comment isn't directed at Mozilla, but other vendors as well. IMO you loose influence by adopting lots of other vendors' tech, whether it's WebP, Dart or asm.js, even if it is open. I'm curious what the tech community thinks of innovation at Opera now that they adopted webkit/blink. Perception is important.
I think religion and god will come first. Most of our issues come from religious books and ideas.
I mean, personally, I have nothing worth looking at.

in my case, alternatives and other solutions are generally too high-effort for me to bother with.

I'd bet most people who know but don't care feel similarly.
I, and basically every language designer since the 80s has disagreed with this. It's needless repetition: all of the information contained in the .h file is duplicated in the .m file. If you really want a nice listing of the exported methods, it's easy to generate that from the .m file.
True story ahead, and I can't figure out how Google did this to me. About a year ago, I noticed a picture of myself
on my Google profile. I never gave them a picture. I don't
even have my real mug on Facebook, but somehow Google got
into my pictures on my Ipad and took a jpeg? I immediately
deleted it. I still can't figure out how they got into the
ipad file?
Or, you know, his source lied?
Why Infinit went down on Friday
NSA is a given if you are using the internet, and it seems like Google _may_ be a given depending on your circumstances (i.e. did you just steal their stuff, etc.). So what else should be stopping this person with high technological competence from using Gmail? And what alternative do you use that's better? Really curious.
It would be great if everyone used PGP/GPG, but there's something missing for it to get widespread adoption. It probably needs to be easier and more user friendly somehow. Perhaps there's an opportunity for someone to do something here.
Open question: what's the best "workspaces" solution for Windows 8? I've seen many and used a few, but each had certain drawbacks. Does anyone have a favorite?
I see only 2 possible problems with that line of reasoning, that would justify thinking directly about computer inteligence, bypassing institutional inteligence:

1 - The researchers can't program those institutions;
2 - The researchers intend to use AI as a tool for that goal.
I'm going to stick with the landlord analogy. It needs to be possible to use a 3rd party service without them being allowed to spy on you, the same way it's possible to rent an apartment without the landlord being allowed to spy on you.

They're certainly able to, and have the keys, but they're not allowed.

Privacy laws should be created (or interpreted) to provide similar protection for the privacy of our data stored by a service.
Uh uh. So we have something being stated as plain fact which, if true, would have been a major, major story by a journalist not exactly known for holding back in his reporting - yet the particular story was never reported as such (the bit about scaring sources is BS, he could just switch channels which he did anyway).

The only corroborating evidence is drunk hearsay. The supposed fallout is implied. I mean, he just knows that Google read his mail - but he doesn't have any solid ideas if his source who he has a direct relationship was fired?

No matter what one wants to think of Google, there is not a single ounce of meat on this story.
As a main language, I agree they're not looking to change anything for a long time coming, but they have made stuff like Quartz Composer (a graphical functional programming language) and Automator. There is a slim sliver of hope they may deem fit to create a HyperCard for the post-PC world. iOS touch interfaces would be the perfect place to reinvent programming as something other than text (since typing on a touchscreen is so painful).
AT&T Exec Calls Netflix’s Reed Hastings “Arrogant” For Net Neutrality Post
Well the new jet has dual FADECs, so you can solve your problem by buying one of them :) I think that for the piston plane market, it's more of a cost/value ratio issue - would you (and customers in general) be willing to pay an extra $50-100k for a FADEC-equipped plane that costs $500k for the whole rest of the plane, just to have the convenience of eliminating manual mixture control? Also some pilots don't want to give up having the ability to control engine temp, power, fuel burn rate, etc manually using the mixture. I know that FADEC-equipped engines have been tested, and will probably be available in the future, it's more of a question of marketing and costs (certification etc) than anything technical.
Eating meat is very natural. Even animals do it.

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior."

-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

I find that paragraph to be a perfect rebuttal to appeals to nature. Hat tip to ChronoDAS for bringing it to my attention: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ud/rationality_quotes_march_2010/1p...
I really like your articulation of this. It has struck me for a while now that the people working on friendly AI could have more impact if they invested their energy and intellectual prowess on the real threats to humanity we currently face rather than an amorphous future hypothetical we are ill prepared to understand.

I also like the alternative problem that you posit: what can we do about existing semi-autonomous systems whose functioning is harmful to humanity? However, I don't feel very hopeful about any sort of solutions we might have to these problems. Semi-autonomous systems at societal level have existed for probably nearly as long as as humanity itself. Are there some good examples of such systems that were initially harmful but have been carefully cultivated by humanity to make their effects largely beneficial?
And so we have 2048 with a corporate touch to it. What next? Microsoft(R) 2048(TM)? Apple i2048?
The first step to getting rid of ugly people, humanely. /s
do no evil
I really respect the way this was posted. A simple side by side. Most of the times stuff like this is posted, it is a horrifically convoluted example to try to show the massive code savings, this one is just -- honest. You save a few lines of code.

That all said, the syntax is godawful. It brings back so many horrors from Python, whitespace, self, ugh. The next step to make it truly awful would be have those minor whitespace errors only show themselves at runtime so writing complex applications becomes a nightmare.

Love the attitude, abhor the project.
Nations: they haven't killed everyone
I've seen portable laptop screens for sale for awhile now, but I've never tried one. I'm curious, though. Has anyone ever used something like these?

https://www.google.com/search?q=portable+laptop+screen

Of course it would add to the energy consumption (and probably the energy used by the laptop), but the advantage is it's light, and in a travel-convenient form factor.
Doesn't this open-source module do the same thing: http://labs.frickle.com/nginx_ngx_cache_purge/

It seems odd for nginx to try to commercialise such basic parts of the stack where 3rd parties can easily write such functionality.
How To Dissect Android Flappy Bird Malware
The arguments in favor of considering an interpreted language as a suitable alternative are not very convincing.

Slower execution is indicative of waste. When it comes to interpreted languages, even those that are very well implemented, any slowness is directly related to energy loss. This is very problematic when it comes to mobile devices, even modern ones, as this energy is generally coming from a rather limited source (the device's battery).

While this may not be a problem if one or two apps are written using a wasteful interpreted language, it can become a much bigger issue when the entire ecosystem is implemented in such a manner. It'd be irresponsible to unnecessarily reduce the battery life of the devices of thousands or even millions of people.

And while many mobile devices today probably are more powerful than desktops from a decade ago, I don't think it's correct to say that those desktops "ran interpreted apps just fine". They didn't. There's a reason why Java has a bad reputation for performance problems, even today: many desktop apps written in Java performed horribly on computers of that era. And Java was perhaps the best-performing of the interpreted or quasi-interpreted languages.
360 Degree view of the Milky Way
>"Is it a possibility that someone has controversial opinions but could be unafraid of expressing them to a group of peers?"

Sure, but if you want to be able to do it more than once you need to be...

1.) Useful enough to someone that the people you offend or scare can't simply discard or destroy you.

2.) Content with a count of friends that hovers near and will almost certainly reach 0 repeatedly.

3.) Prepared to deal with people who feel righteous glee in taking the most extreme misinterpretations of your words possible and maliciously applying them to you and yours.

4.) Plastic enough in your thinking that in the face of new evidence you're able accept not just that you were wrong, but that you've hurt and alienated people over things you have now reversed on.

Related to this, one thing I find interesting is that I actually have to filter myself far more when speaking anonymously online than I do in person.

I get the impression that online communications tend to be scored more often than understood. It's up or down, agree or not, run across a hot-button keyword and idea is instantly categorized and binned as this or that.

Face to face, when you can pair a threatening idea with a calm and friendly face or something which sounds wrong with a visible intelligence people tend to more amenable to understanding.
Found it. Thanks!
Are they, though? I wish I could just agree, but inconveniently the three or four strikingly terrible programmers I've encountered don't conform to this. (And the worst of them, who I only knew as a name on an @author tag, I had assumed to be male (and felt a kind of relief about it - "I'm not being sexist, worst of all is x and he's a guy"), so this isn't a case of prejudices clouding the assessment).
National Anthem at Red Sox v. Yankees – Let's make it go VIRAL
To the extent that this is true, it seems like it's been true for pretty much the whole of human history.
HFX Monster Fanless PC (zero noise from i7-4770K and GeForce GT)
Julia vs. Python: Monte Carlo Simulations of Bitcoin Options
Stockholm syndrome from too many years in the company of archaic compilation models: it's real and it's scary!
Its true, but there are even fields of science based almost entirely on assumptions.

Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".
A non Google email account can be accessed from anywhere. Maybe Gooogle installed a keylogger on his work computer? Maybe they broke into his house and accessed it what way? Nothing about that statement, or the article proves that Google read the reporter's email and not the leakers.
This is really all about whether or not network providers can flips the switch and charge both sides of the traffic flow for traffic. They are trying to make that switch.

Ultimately charging large content sites more is going to spiral into charging all content providers, because behaviors will change, new services will get popular and everybody ends up having to pay on both sides. Netflix is already paying to get traffic from its servers to the peered internet.
HIV transmission is a good example of a wildly controversial topic, that is actually no longer discussed. it's considered a settled issue that everyone is equally likely to get HIV.

on IQ - I'm not sure that's necessarily true, or at least, the differences are complex (one group has a slightly higher average, the other a higher standard deviation, which has implications at the right-end of the bell curve). but for day-to-day social impact, that's not nearly as important as wondering what society should with people in the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, which is another topic we don't discuss.

I often wonder whether the political correctness furies directed at pg were a factor in him putting sam altman in charge.

for example - it was considered wildly controversial to say that not being able so speak english without a heavy accent might put you at a disadvantage in starting a company in an english speaking country. really?

also - yc is the most forward thinking vc on women's issues in the country, and yet they were still accused of gender bias etc. wildly unfair, you might say.

kind of hard for a thoughtful person to deal with all that chatter. you have to adopt a PR perspective, make general statements - no longer operating from a place of logic, just a desire not to offend.

my sense is that there are many foolish things progressive americans believe which future generations will laugh at. we already laugh publicly at conservatives, but we're supposed to take everything progressives say seriously.

here's a controversial closer - even if we equalized educational access to EECS, funding - women would be less likely to start companies than men, because men are hard-wired to take risks (hormonal profiles, probably other brain circuitry). tens of thousands of years of evolution can't easily be overcome, in even 100 years.

doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage women, or that they can't do it (they obviously can) but bemoaning the out-of-whack ratios constantly, and expecting parity to be around the corner, seems foolish IMHO.
They can, and many do or have done so in the past.

Let's not pretend that security incident post-mortems are anything new; they aren't. There's not really even anything special about this one.

I don't really see much point in applauding these guys for doing what's perhaps the minimum we should expect from them in this situation.
I'm trying to turn Emacs into an outliner that can natively read/write OPML files. After asking #emacs today, I think the key bit is using "format conversion" [1] to accomplish this.

I've finally gotten over the "beginner hump" when it comes to elisp and its becoming a fun little language to toy around with. I figure this'll take a good chunk of Saturday.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/For...
Is the last sentence referring to government regulation?
Are you sure that's what sysadmins themselves do? In practice, the "sysadmin" seems to be "that guy who does all the stuff that we don't know how to automate."

The people who do the automation--if it's repeatable, instead of per-site one-off stuff--are just called developers. E.g., the Docker developers, or the Erlang developers.
> Once 50% of software engineers are women, and once women have exactly the same interests and values and beliefs as men,

I'm struggling to interpret that sentence in a charitable manner. Could you clarify what you meant? Are you saying that, when it comes to development, male values/interests (whatever that could possibly mean anyway) are the only ones worth having and that women need to conform to them?
Do You Know What Metrics are Driving Your Performance? 
Practice a call center culture of transparency, open-communication, & unify expectations throughout your organization. Improve performance, increase engagement, and lower attrition.
Normal? I have no idea. Possible? Certainly.
I love emacs, and I appreciate you taking the time to learn how to extend it.
Why This AdTech Startup Turned Down Seed Funding
No not really. Ruby is a fine text language but it offers no benefits or advantages like what I described in the article, safe maybe a REPL. But we can have that already with the Super Debugger, for example.
Despite upsets 16 still alive for $1 billion NCAA challenge
No bait intended, I honestly mean it. I just felt like "it tastes good" being a weak justification since it is by nature very subjective, so I look for a better justification.

also, to answer in order:
-Indeed, there are multiple approaches, and this is why I find it hard to select one vs. the other. If my body "craves" meat, there's usually a reason due to digestive peptides that the nutrition from the food I'm craving is something that'd be useful. I realize I could with time potentially reprogram this, but, the statement stands.

-You'd actually be wrong. I enjoy both bow hunting (which I had the opportunity to learn initially as a boy scout) and game shooting.

-If you notice, I qualify that with avoiding creating undue harm. I think it's quite a strawman to draw an equivalence between consuming animals that are killed in a humane fashion with e.g. rape especially. If you kept it to manslaughter, you'd have a stronger point, since I have a hard time arguing against anything outside of specific targeted uses of violence either. (please don't take this as bait; just that there have been wars in history I do not oppose.)
Puh-lease, keep your fanboyism in check.

foo@bar:~$ dig -t mx kalzumeus.com

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;kalzumeus.com. IN MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
kalzumeus.com. 3600 IN MX 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
kalzumeus.com. 3600 IN MX 10 aspmx.l.google.com.
kalzumeus.com. 3600 IN MX 30 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
kalzumeus.com. 3600 IN MX 50 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
kalzumeus.com. 3600 IN MX 40 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
Legal, doesn't have to be part of the contract (though I'm sure it helps)

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/email-monitoring-can-...
While I agree with the OP in that there are certainly improvements that could be made to Objective-C I find myself disagreeing with a lot of the ideas in the post, especially this paragraph:

>We think we know what we want from an Objective C replacement. We want Garbage Collection, we want better concurrency, we don’t want pointers. We want better networking, better data base, better syncing functionality. We want a better, real runtime. We don’t want header files or import statements.

We don't want Garbage Collection to the contrary we want reference counting. Reference counting is the best compromise between handling memory manually and using GC ala Java. I would argue that the mental strain for the programmer is equal for reference counting(at least with ARC) to that of GC. However Reference Counting is extremely lightweight.

Regarding concurrency it should be mentioned that I don't have a huge amount of experience with different languages. I've done concurrency in Erlang, Java/JR, C++ and Objective-C. I'd say that GDC from Objective-C and possibly Erlang were the easiest to use.

Why wouldn't we want pointers? Most modern languages use pointers under the surface, there are significant benefits in not obscuring and hiding this as is done in Java.

We do want header files and imports because they provide a bunch of benefits namely separation of interface and implementation, distribution of compiled implementations with interfaces in header files. With the @import option compile time is significantly faster as well.

I'll deliberately skip the last points, suffice to say I don't feel strongly about them. I do agree on the data base point though.

My own revised list of things that Objective-C needs are. Proper static typing(no id), templates and namespaces.

EDIT: The point about requiring a programer to change a color is interesting, all though I would argue that the same holds true for web. I have rarely worked with designers who are proficient enough in git and css to make such changes. In the case that the designer is proficient enough to handle git, a css like json file can be used to specify the look of the app and thus changing colour would only involve editing a json file which is comparable to editing a css file
2048 in Minecraft
>I wouldn't want to be a female founder accepted into ycombinator and then have myself or others wonder if I am part of some kind of quota

I'm far removed from YC and the startup scene, but as an exceptionally intelligent black man I do have experience with scenarios that might lead one to feel that way. My advice is simply: don't feel that way. Be completely confident in yourself and abilities and ignore what others might be thinking. YC should not be seen as validation in any way, but as a stepping stone for your personal goals. In that light, the exact reasons you were funded are of no concern to your future success. Besides, I'm sure many a founder has been accepted for superficial reasons (being from the right school, having the right look, etc). If certain of your traits happen to match the current funding trends then so be it; consider it a stroke of luck and nothing else. I guarantee you the next white kid from Stanford that gets funded will not be sitting around wondering if he really belongs there.
Interesting interview. However, the notion of a "planned economy", even for a left-wing person such as yours truly, echoes of dreadful communist five-year plans. I remember, in Accelerando, the idea of algorithmically assigning resources, but it sounds very hard to do in practice, even though our current economic model is both unfair and headed for disaster in the not-so-long term.
> :%s/function/module/ and no meaning is lost :).

Javascript has functions, from the function keyword. Node.js uses commonjs. In commonjs, every file is a module. You can use

module.exports = <value>;

You can access the module by using require.

var moduleValue = require("path/to/module");

It's powerful because it doesn't have the namespace collisions that Ruby has. Everything is not global all the time. modules are also an elegant way of holding private state using closures.

Having a class with a single method is the Ruby way of categorizing this method within the domain.