skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting post, but could use a [1995] in the title.

For those that are interested in some radical proposals to try and move things forward, I recommend having a look at the work that's being done at the Viewpoints Research Institute (with among others, Alan Kay):

http://www.viewpointsresearch.org/

There's a lot of different papers, but the last annual report of STEPS is a good place to start:

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

[edit: Sadly, as far as I've been able to figure out, the kscript and ksworld software mentioned in the last few reports, isn't available anywhere. But I did discover a port of squeak to the lively (js) kernel system:

https://github.com/bertfreudenberg/SqueakJS
]
Is this equal to OSSEC, an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System? http://www.ossec.net/
Ah, should not comment before the coffee kicks in... That's actually an awesome concept. Thanks for the explanation.
I don't think a good case is made here. If it doesn't need to be tested, that implies it doesn't need to work. If it doesn't need to work, you don't need to write it in the first place.
It's just to say a startup can do great things before reaching 50 employees. Even if you ignore the crazy amount WhatsApp was sold for, you can still see that they got a pretty successful product and a huge user base with that number of employees.
I foresee an entire industry dedicated to "retouching" police videos so they're "better" evidence.
Wise thoughts here, especially on "reasonably current" and teachable.. I share similar characteristics in what I look for in engineering hires, especially when certain aspects of the tech landscape change so quickly. Especially around "programming language" requirements: I don't really care if you know Ruby/python/PHP/JAVA so much as you've worked in a high-up time scalable environment, working in large code bases, with solid tech design chops, you'll fill in the 'language' requirement pretty quickly if you're actually the right type of person to hire. Even more so if you're motivated and have a strong desire to work with our tech stack...
Hey, I would like to get in touch with you, as I am about to take a year off to try building an app based lifestyle business. My email is in my profile.

Just looking for some hints and tips, will probably setup an 'Ask HN' closer to the start- I have about three months of commitments left before I go full time on app building.
The author simplifies the problem a lot I think. He says there's is a quite clear line between logging, alerting, etc. -- I say there isn't. What we did recently in a quite critical system is we had a process to scrape the logfiles -- essentially tailing them and looking for words like 'error', 'fail', 'exception', and so on (well, it was a bit more intelligent than that). Whenever something smelly happened, then we received the log fragment in email.

I hear the uproar, and I must say this was not our main alerting system. This was the 2nd or 3rd fallback, because an alerting system has a lot of dependencies and complexity, and it might fail in certain (unforeseen) circumstances. Having an extra line of defense is nice, and there is a well-tested, widely-used, reasonably simple way of communicating system state (including problems): using a simple logging framework.

You could write something extremely simple low-level stuff for sending alerts when the more sophisticated alerting system (with GUI, etc.) fails, but why not use something that has been tested already?
I think that your comment and submission system is imperfect to begin with.

Submission:

How many time do you see a new submission that is basically a repost from another one. This is quite high in fact, specially with topic that some user feel really strongly about. It is diluting the potential for meaningful discussion.

But you have as well the issue of submission that don't match PST timezone which means in turn that the submission, although it would match the interest of the HN population and the type of topics that one would expect to find on HN, take a huge dive in the list of upvoted topics, and once again no meaningful discussion comes out of it.

Comments:

The current upvote system shows very little information. And more than often, user can comments to just thank the author, instead of just upvoting. It might be because there isn't any visual cues of what the current points a comment has gathered or who has upvoted that. One could argue more transparency could lead to a clan issue where some user might want to consciously upvote a sumbission / comment as a group for their own visibility as a group.

There is also the issue of duplication of opinions in the comments, and discussion that take a tangent from the original topic. Both that are mentioned and addressed through the pending comments, but a simple collapsing of child node in the comment tree would have more welcome than this highly debatable feature.

Thanks,

Tam
> It really confounds me how RMS can reject DRM but be so supportive of his own freedom-limiting psychological DRM of sorts.

I think you are unfair by calling copyleft licenses "DRM of sorts". Copyleft licenses voluntarily make a compromise: they chose to lessen the freedom of individuals to grow the freedom of the group/community. You may or may not agree with that, but you have to recognize that such trade-offs are necessary to organize a society. A clear example is the law which forbid one to kill someone else: at the individual level, they deprive you of the right to kill people, but at the same time they increase the freedom of the society as a whole. DRM are not the same: at no points they benefit to the people who are restricted by them.

I would call copyfree licences more permissives and copyleft licences more restrictives. But I would not call copyfree licences more free than copyleft licences. I would do the opposite. Maybe this says that I value the freedom of the society more than the freedom of individuals, because I do not believe at all that the freedom of the society is the mere sum of the freedom of the individuals who compose it.
ACPI is, at the moment, the most labour-efficient way of getting suspend and resume working on the widest variety of hardware.

The alternative Mark is putting forward is for manufacturers to support Linux directly, which isn't going to happen until it's as dominant as windows. Compare the android situation, where you get manufacturer support but not updates or proper merges into upstream.
Sent you a couple of fixes.
In this international world, lots of things invented in SF end up helping people all over the world. It doesn't have to be about the money.
The climate change deniers have won
> The only thing to note about current JSON support in PostgreSQL is that, as far as I know, there is no way to update parts of a JSON document

That's what jsonb fixes.
You can also just edit the boot command and add/modify the line init=... to init=/bin/sh
The problem is that there is no such thing as a universally agreed upon concept of public domain. If you actually care about licensing and want your project to globally and legally be in something like the public domain, in the US sense, then you're going to have to use something like the creative commons CC0 license.

Of course if you don't really care all that much about the details of international copyright law and just think it's cool to swear on the internet then the WTFPL will be fine.
Some sites don't work unless I turn off hosts. On MS-Windows I simply use this to toggle hosts file on and off in such cases - http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman
Copyfree: Unfetter your ideas
You may use Levenshtein Distance to get better results by taking word variations into account.

And also you can enhance it by using semantic similarity scores for strings.
I think the comparison with Overstock may be a bit flawed. The president of Overstock, Patrick Byrne, has been at war with Wall Street for a number of years. He blames them for naked short selling (an illegal practice of selling stock short that you haven't borrowed) and is actually suing the "prime brokers" (the ones who handle most of the stock trades):

http://www.overstock.com/Patrick-Byrne/7371/static.html

Thus overstock has been under attack by Wall Street and has an incredible high short interest. 20% of the stock is reported to be sold short, although Patrick thinks, with the unreported naked short selling, that the number is much higher:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=OSTK
I doubt this will run well on anything but the latest high base clock PC's. I have a 2.2 Ghz Sandy Bridge laptop, with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 Ghz, but Turbo Boost is mainly marketing scam by Intel, so it will run as if it's 2.2 Ghz. Plus Haswell only has a ~15 percent IPC improvement over SNB. With the PS2 emulator I can't even get 60 fps for most games.
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It's unfortunate that the only other comments so far are about the fact this article is a few years old. Clearly what's interesting here is the method itself, not its immediate impact on the StarCraft II metagame.

Real-time strategy games have recently stimulated a lot of great research [1] because they exhibit several interesting subproblems such as resource allocation optimization, strategy selection, or plan optimization (like here). It also has the nice side effect that it makes it easy to evaluate the quality of the resulting plan in a real-world setting and see how it fares when certain assumptions are relaxed (non-static opponents, effect of imperfect strategy execution, etc.).

In this case what they did is solve a multi-objective optimization problem [2] using a genetic algorithm (a popular way to do so). The goal is to optimize some metric (e.g. time) with respect to some objective (e.g. "build 8 units of this type") and some constraints (resource requirements, unit trees). Of course you could perform some form of search in the solution space, but this space can become pretty big pretty fast and for complex games it's fairly easy to be stuck in a local optimum because the net effect of some choices can be hard to assess (some can be bad in the short term but be a nice set-up in the medium term, and two bad tactics can interact to be a good strategy). In contrast, a genetic algorithm can help find the global optimum.

While it's not as big as the article makes it sound (it's not a "winning build" per se -- more like a method to find the fastest way to achieve a known opening), if you combined plan selection methods (e.g. [3]) with plan-optimization techniques like this one, you could come up with an IA that is able to come-up with both near-optimal tactics (how to achieve an objective) and strategies (which objectives to pursue). Pretty interesting stuff overall, and applicable to more than just real-time strategy games.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22real-time+strategy+ga...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-objective_optimization

[3] http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11536406_4
Yeah I think it may be short sighted to shortcut a build+release process just to save a few hours. I can only imagine what might go wrong or what I might miss. Someone else mentioned code signatures which is a good point.
Young Millionaire: Inside the Mind of Yahoo's Teen Sensation Nick D'Aloisio
I wonder how much of the "younger people are just smarter" Zuckemberg quote is he actually thinking that and how much is "People here in Springfield really know how to rock!"
It would behoove the author of this list to learn HTML and CSS so such things are not so shocking and mysterious to him.

I should start a blog about the horrors or C where mysteries are explained such as "You must declare variables before you use them!!" followed by appropriate horror music.
Turkey: Twitter was blocked for acting "above the law"
I was skeptical of this as well; I had the FSF licensing team confirm that the WTFPL is a free software license a month or two ago. You can see it here:

https://gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#WTFPL

From Joshua Gay:

> Our interpretation of this license is that it is
> intended to allow you to do whatever you want with the
> work. Therefore, we assume that this includes using,
> copying, modifying, and distributing modifications for any
> purpose.

He was, however, cautious to say "I can not conjecture how a court would
interpret that phrase" and recommended to consult a lawyer.
Cross-Platform Software Update and Messaging System – Give us feedback
How to explain buffer overflow to a layman
Preach it brother! Much truth in this.
The categorical term was necessary to the anecdote. Using a categorical term does not imply discrimination.

In fact none of the sentences you list are real evidence of discrimination, especially in the context of a discussion where it's necessary to separate candidates or hires into categories based on age/sex/religion/etc.

I was skeptical of the guy from China... because we was unable to answer any of the technical questions we asked him during the interview.

You'll note that the parent did not specifically say his skepticism was due to age. Instead he listed standard employment history features that are more common among older programmers.
Good reference! Point taken :)
I don't disagree on the sensory isolation, but I think one of the reasons for social isolation is problem inmates who antagonize and provoke other inmates.

Sure you could physically isolate inmates, but allow them to communicate, but that would be like keeping two roosters together separated by chicken wire; they'd be at each other constantly with verbal threats, etc. Doesn't sound that much better.
Is is possible to release software with a licence, which prohibits it's use for religious entities?
This assumes e.g. that I can extend my ring finger without also extending the adjacent middle finger. ;)
Personally I found it beneficial to have a "work computer", a "work phone", and keep things entirely separate from my home setup. That meant if I were working I'd use the dedicated hardware, and if not I would use my stuff.

There were certainly times when I worked overnight, but in general the idea was to pretend I was in an office, and only bootup the work-machine when I was actually in working hours.

I did deviate a few times, when the work broadband was down, but my personal one was up, but I kept that as minimal as I could.
Last Week’s Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong
Technologies go around and around. This is just like storing my Sinclair Spectrum programs on a cassette recorder.

Good stuff!
What you're missing is a time stamp. Discrimination follows a pattern. i) It's acceptable, ii) It's actively questioned and discussed and meets denial and resistance iii) it's broadly accepted as a problem and addressed (but who knows when it's fully resolved if ever)

Discrimination against tech workers over 40 is a very newly discovered issue. So it's unfair to say he's on par with racial or other more thoroughly discussed areas of discrimination.
Swearing for the sake of swearing is never appropriate. I agree with you.
Many of the forks weren't/aren't serious anyway and the majority died out pretty soon, they shouldn't be seen as competition or wasted time. If you just want to experiment and don't want to pay attention to some community guidelines etc., then forking is better. It is exactly this freedom I love about Linux or open source in general.
Ahem... http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-br...
I think the biggest fuck up would have been trying to force divergent economies to share the same currency.
ACPI isn't going away on PCs, ditching it means ditching PCs as a target.
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No, he is suggesting that making a mutual agreement not to do so is illegal, just like a whole range of other actions that have price setting effects are legal when a company does it in isolation but illegal when multiple companies collude to affect the pricing.
Has anyone seen a guide that discusses which browser settings and plugins complement one another? Or which ones to use in different scenarios, e.g., I know what I'm doing, I don't mind if things break on occasion, and I'm willing to spend a lot of time training my plugins (so NoScript and/or RequestPolicy would be recommended) vs. I'm setting up a computer for my parents who aren't tech savvy (so maybe Disconnect or Ghostery, plus....?).

This comes up a fair amount on Hacker News and in http://www.reddit.com/r/Privacy and I've seen plenty of posts and guides like https://prism-break.org/en/ and http://www.logicalincrements.com/firefox/ that just list a bunch of plugins. What I'm looking for is a set of use cases.
Indeed, I'm Dutch and based in the Netherlands. So is the startup in question.

The problem highlighted by the article is relatively SF-specific indeed, but you see the same vibe in Dutch startups (less so in older tech businesses here, but there it's just that 50 is considered old instead of 40 - the difference isn't that big).

I don't see how that makes the anecdote less strong though. Why wouldn't there be similarly competent 40+ year old people in SF? I feel that startups that are open to hiring older people in a climate like the one described in this article have a competitive advantage on the job market. It makes me anecdote only more applicable to SF, not less.
Why Google Has the Best Shot at Making the Killer Smartwatch
The way I see it, I may have a lot of student debt, but at least I'm not being held in prison for 20+ years because of some arbitrary mandatory minimum law created by a politician I probably elected.

FAMM, NORML and the rest of the groups fighting this have a huge problem. People that are successful have very limited and usually no exposure to anyone that has been in prison. This disconnect is making it extremely difficult for them to raise the money they nee to fight this huge problem we have.

The solution which I am struggling to find would involve creating a message that touches the middle class. Without that message a ridiculous number of people will continue to spend a long time in prison that shouldn't be there.
See above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7457817
To get the lowest price:

setInterval(function() { $("#price").val(0); $("#bid-button").click(); }, 100);

:)

I like the idea by the way.
Can someone explain what this is? The front page tells me nothing and I can't watch the video right now.

I wish this trend of using videos instead of text would end soon.
Oauth Login System
The author, @mdo, also wrote Bootstrap.
Thank you everyone.

After my pretty dismal launch about a week ago, many of you messaged me and provided everything from business advice to technical advice to moral support from those who've been there before.

This is my gift to you, use HN50 when checking out to get 50% off any server plan, for as long as you wish to keep the plan, including annual plans.

Again, everyone, thanks.

Edit: Currently all my 1270v3 machines are out of stock, and so are my 1230v3 SSDs. I'm waiting to get more in stock, but I still have quite a few 1230v3 HDD left.
It is not appropriate to compare DRM---a concept that exists to prevent studying and sharing---with a movement designed to ensure exactly that.

See <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html>.

Snippet from <http://mikegerwitz.com/2013/08/FreeBSD-Clang-and-GCC-Copylef...:

----

Copyleft is important[7] because it ensures that all users will forever have the four fundamental freedoms associated with Free Software[6]. The GPL incorporates copyleft; BSD licenses do not. Consider why this is a problem: Imagine some software Foo licensed under the Modified BSD license[10]. Foo is free software; it is licensed under a free software license (Modified BSD).[5] Now consider that someone makes a fork—a derivative—of Foo, which we will call “Foobar”. Since the Modified BSD license is not copyleft[10], the author of Foobar decides that he or she does not wish to release its source code; this is perfectly compliant with the Modified BSD license, as it does not require that source code be distributed with a binary (it only requires—via its second clause[10]—that the copyright notice, list of conditions and disclaimer be provided).

The author has just taken Foo and made it proprietary.

The FreeBSD community is okay with this; the free software community is not[4]. There is a distinction between these two parties: When critics of copyleft state that they believe the GPL is “less free” than more permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses, they are taking into consideration the freedoms of developers and distributors; the GPL, on the other hand, explicirly restricts these parties' rights in order to protect the users because those parties are precisely those that seek to restrict the users' freedoms; we cannot provide such freedoms to developers and distributors without sacrificing the rights of the vulnerable users who generally do not have the skills to protect themselves from being taken advantage of.[13] Free software advocates have exclusive, unwaivering loyalty to users.
"Poaching" as an anti-competitive angle is the same as saying a sales pitch to another company's customer is anti-competitive. Customers don't belong to a company, and people don't belong to a company. The comparison to the steel goods scenario isn't appropriate, in that those resources are the property of a company.

Mostly, the last thing any of us wants is a select group of dominant companies making a collective decision for the industry.
BSON actually was considered as the JSON storage format for PostgreSQL, but was discarded once people figured out that BSON stores ["a", "b", "c"] as {0: "a", 1: "b", 2: "c"} which is just silly.
Fighting Turkey's Twitter Ban With DNS Graffiti
> flat out kill you

This is just speculation. You don't know what they would do if you gave them a chance, a second chance, a third chance, lots of love and a few material means. As a proof, incarceration rate is lower in my country [1] and we have less violence on the street.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...
Call me when he does something other than become a wikipedia footnote for Nepotism
Does it matter though, this is an elegant hack in the true sense of the word.

The cell processors architecture pretty much rules out high fidelity emulation directly on an x86 chip any time soon.

Not all hacks have to be useful (even for a given value of useful).
Minor bug, if i type in a number and click 'add to cart' it says I won it for that number.
Bah, nonsense. Re-read my post. I wasn't skeptical because of his age, it was because he looked like a dull guy with a dull CV at first glance. I introduced him as "the guy over 40" in the first paragraph, which makes sense given the subject at hand. And it is why you can take a line of my post out of context and make me seem like an asshole for writing "When hiring, I was very skeptical of the guy over 40".

Are we so far now that we have to think about formulating our HN comments so that someone can't take parts out of context? Lovely.
Humans Are Predictable
What makes people click
One does not even need to enable password protection of Grub. Linux will ask for the root password before granting access to recovery mode. That stopped working at the early 2000s. The author must use a pretty stupid distro to not notice it by 2013.

Anyway, want to gain access to the computer? Get a screwdriver.
Yes, I see this two from end users in my company. They us as just a code monkey.

They think they know the best way to do something, not realizing the fact that as someone creating the code, you have probably seen similar problems numerous times, and have a far better way of solving the problem.

I am constantly asked for a new excel to upload data. I refuse these days, (they are far too error prone). Instead I build a web form instead, with JavaScript emulating whatever usability features they required Excel for (usually just a bit of copy pasting). Last time I did showed the user what I had come up with the response was "this is shit". I asked her what it was missing, sorted the JavaScript, and two days later she asked if I could replace another of her Excels with a similar form.