skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"Marriage" IS a civil contract. This is the entire point of the institution.

I think the fairest way to characterize it is that it is a term that means multiple things to different groups, much as you said... However, while it may not be your view, many religions view the institution of marriage as being much more than just a civil contract as you have by saying "that is the entire point of the institution."

>That all said, we pretty much have the same view, but I propose a slightly different solution: drop one of the terms entirely. There is no reason to differentiate between civil unions and marriage. They are legally the exact same thing - no reason to have two terms for it.

Again, to you there's no reason to differentiate, but for many, there are two parts to it all -- the contract via the state and the religious vows via the church. I think it's actually more helpful to understand the two parts, lest we make the silly mistake many anti-gay marriage types do, which is to assume that the government wants to push anything on anyone's religion.

Instead, the argument is most easily made, IMHO, that inasmuch as it's solely a civil matter, irrespective of religious matters, then gay marriage is a simple matter of equality under the law. What churches do with their marriage rituals is up to them and is a non factor for the state.
"What the hell is Strangecoin?" Youtube roundtable chat.
But does "opposing speech" have to include getting someone fired for something they did 6 years ago? Opposing speech in an open democratic society shouldn't have the effect of oppressing the speech of others -- even if such actions are technically legal. Otherwise, it becomes the "open democratic society for the people whose opinions I like."

Using one's right to free speech to oppose bigoted speech is not impeding anybody's rights.

This is technically true, but the way such an idea was applied in this case lacks something of the spirit of free speech in a truly tolerant and open society.
Yelp Reviews Brew Fight Over Free Speech, Fairness
Heads-up: You have Hacker News twice on the list.
mckit: a MATLAB library for Matrix Completion
So they're planning to tell their paying customers that they value the ad-driven customers more, as Pandora told me in a job interview? The Future is Now!
What sort of changes can we see from this move? Could we generate ASP code by writing it in PHP first? Can .NET be run on Apache and linux servers?
Sure, the point is that meritocracy and communism are not the only options.
Another day, another demonstration that the loudest voices on any given issue are never those that are most nuanced. The squeaky wheel gets the grease indeed.
Unfortunately Eich's opinion (and monetary contributions) are damaging to others, which is why it's an issue. It's not "I like blue soccer balls and not red ones", it is "those with red soccer balls are immoral and therefore should not be allowed to play soccer". The campaign is not trying to force him to like red soccer balls, it is to accept that he should not be able to prevent those who like red soccer balls (or, as is likely, were genetically predisposed to only like red soccer balls) from playing soccer at all.

Whether or not he should have lost his job/been forced to resign/felt compelled to resign is another question. I don't think anyone would debate that he has been bad for Mozilla in his time with them so far.
NASA SpaceApps Challenge – Hackathon for science
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The Challenge is a codeathon-style event, which will bring together people interested in collaborating on developing solutions to address some of NASA's real-life challenges, to improve life on Earth and in space.
Your choice really depends on your brand. I live in NYC and most of the time that I order food online I just go to Seamless and decide what looks good. There's only been one restaurant that I order from off their own site and that's a pizza place that I love that isn't on Seamless.

If you're a random sushi or Chinese place it's worth the 25% to be in the Seamless directory because otherwise no one will ever order from you. Katz's Deli could probably get away with ordering on their own site because their brand is good enough.
Yeah, I wish you could do that without the focus call: http://stackoverflow.com/q/22046683/4525

But what then is the point of setting tabindex?
You left out bestiality.

(which I've never understood why it wasn't spelled "beastiality")

I guess the rationale for specifically bestowing marital rights on same-sex (but non-related) spouses is that there's a significant number of them.

Polygamy, too, there might be a lot of that somewhere in the world, possibly Africa, obscure corners of Utah, certainly pre-modern China when it was normal for a wealthy land owner to have several wives, etc. I suspect it won't be long before polygamy is legalized. Maybe a couple of decades at most.
if a person sincerely believed that black people should not be granted equal rights

You got the analogy incorrect. What if that person sincerely believed that the policy preserved equal rights?
Oh come on, did you miss the huge backlash when fb took over occulus rift? And Google get a lot of shit for closing much used and loved services.

But Microsoft wanted to remove the open web, in favour of all their proprietary services, such as Active-X. Places like South Korea foolishly followed the MS paradigm, and they are suffering for it now. Microsoft wanted to control everything, and kill Linux and over open source projects by spreading FUD.
As a former history Ph.D. student who has done research in the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum (ASV), this is kind of an uninformed announcement, or at least it is not the whole truth. The truth is that the Vatican already has all of its pre-modern manuscripts (e.g., roughly pre-1700) digitized. In fact, you're not allowed to read the original copies of the older manuscripts. Instead, when you request a manuscript they hand you a CD that you then take down a flight of stairs to a room with iMac G4's that aren't connected to the Internet where you can view the jpeg's using some early 2000's image viewer. Anyone with a master's degree and with a legitimate claim to being a researcher can visit the archive after a brief interview, and the application process is perfectly straightforward and made public on the ASV's website in multiple language. There is nothing "secret" about it. (It is "secret" in the Latin sense of the word meaning "apart," because it was established as a central archive meant to replace the decentralized archives that were hitherto held in each of the Vatican's individual departments.)

They could have put the digital copies up a long, long time ago if they had felt like it, but libraries are institutions of power and old attitudes die hard. I don't know what the new digitized copies will add, but I'm guessing that they will be in color and that they will also include the more modern manuscripts in the collection. There are more important reforms that they could divert their resources to, however, like better and more uniform indexing and cataloging. Perhaps these will follow, but even once (if) they put the copies on the Internet the state of the Vatican catalogs is such that it will be extremely difficult for any interested members of the public to approach the source material.
Tell HN: App idea that should become reality
I would pay for an app that allowed me to take a picture of a reading/pages of a book and get a summary for it. This would be incredibly useful for schoolwork.
Basically like summly, but the summarized text isn't from some news site, but from the place you want it from (preferably a picture).
If you make this and have it as an iPhone app, please tell me about it, and I will definitely buy it: aeip@live.com
True, but there are no hidden variables in the copenhagen interpretation.
True randomness eliminates determinism. With determinism free will is ruled out. That doesn't mean everything that shows true randomness has free will.
I quite agree that one can always come up with new tests. But the pertinent question is whether in this case Nests's QA would have anticipated, yet not tested for, this particular error condition.
I believe that on balance the answer is yes, probably they did. A question which follows then is, assuming I am right, what is a reasonable amount of blame for failing to test prior to release?
Perhaps you can weight the flags of users. Like users who have flagged non-spam content in the past don't count, and people who have flagged lots of spam count more.
I think you're bickering at cross purposes.

An onsite interview can (and probably should) involve sitting you in front of their computer, and getting you to close a ticket.

If you give people homework problems, then it's possible they will either palm them off to a more competent friend (or just pay $100 for a freelancer); or consider it an insulting waste of time.

Neither will test whether the candidate is reliable. But at least an onsite test will be harder for them to fob off to someone else; and it's less of a waste of time. It might take them a day or more to set up a "hello world" build at home (depending on the build requirements, and how well you've automated things).
It proves the exact opposite.
$25 and has been good enough for me. No warm water line, but you can spend $20 more for one that has that if you care.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TPGPUW/
Really? Wouldn't it make even more sense to remove shoes if you live in a rural area where you are more likely to be stomping through mud.
I thought some scientists hadn't really closed the book on bell's inequality

That isn't what the post you linked to, or the links it gives, says. Bell's inequality is violated. The book is closed on that. (Technically, there are a few holdouts who won't be convinced unless we do the experiments with 100% accurate detectors, but they've been done with detectors that are better than 90% accurate and the inequality is violated.)
Over lunch I mentioned tarsnap's hit by bus plan to the honchos of a seven figure/year business that needs secure offsite backups. They had a good laugh and dismissed tarsnap completely.

For my own needs I can't use it because I can't tolerate the casual backup obliteration policy.

The message I got out of patio11's work was that there are show stopping issues that are not fundamental to excellence of the product. Lose them. Help more people.

Bill me monthly. Don't obliterate the backups I'm counting on. You can have my business, my recommendations, and my thanks.

(And by all means he should, get a person or a service to take care of all that billing nuisance. Don't let it bring him down. I contract people to collect the money I don't enjoy collecting. That person needs a job too.)
It still looks terrible on Linux for me as well.
Rotten old books can be salvaged using advanced techniques, maybe old data CDs can be too.
Tarnsap is not actually open source, so you could not do that.
What's ahead: the information age transition
how can you change mount option online?
Do you really think that's what this is about?

Sorry, but I call fake.

In many countries, you have the concept of de-facto relationships - you don't even need to be married, let alone have a civil union, and you have the same rights.

So it's not like the courts couldn't do it - and in many cases have.

However, this entire debate is purely one of ideology and semantics.

It was never about "privileges" (whether tax, medical, or whatever), but about two different people trying to define what marriage meant.

For some groups, marriage has ties to family and raising children - and human society has sort of flowed along those lines for thousands of years.

Another groups says times are a changing, and we need to redefine marriage to also include homosexual relationships, which while nothing to do with families (as we know them) or creating children, are still marriages.
"Seriously the best thing I have ever tried" - what on Earth would be the purpose of spamming that?
I think it has to do with the cognitive dissonance between society's judgement onto individuals to amass wealth and that individual's sense of personal fulfillment. Suppose you're an immigrant who won the H1B lottery to come to US from Nepal and earn 10-20x the notional amount of income you'd at home, way more than your parents. Would you be happy?

Like the immigrant, children of the families whose mom's earned only $20K was launched from their socio-economicsphere to another one, the millionaire and above and one citizen in the elite citizenry of one million. Like the immigrant, the children of suddenly acquired wealth still identify the values of his/her original "homeland," values such as humility and hard work instead of vanities and the weariness of those who have had a luxury to be "anxious" about self-fulfillment.

The immigrants will not find a sense of belonging, a sense of even accomplishment in the new land. Strangely, they find themselves bewildered as their families and the mantras of what they've been reciting all their lives all have touted as the "touchstone" of their journey. Now that they've arrived, they feel first elated, then slight flatlined, then keeping up the appearances and confused and then cheated and robbed.

We've been telling ourselves that starting that startup, taking that job offer, going that school will enable us to have the X: the money, the respect, the cachet, the X and only after X, we'll be whole and then we'll really do the Y, what we really want to do. Or we lock ourselves in a mental prison, disavowing what society have imposed on us regarding X and paint a black & white picture of us pursuing Y and the man forcing X on our throat.

But why do we not consider ourselves whole? That is the question we push to the back of my mind chasing the X's and Y's of the day in an attempt to make up for the feeling of incompleteness (like a snake devouring its tail).
>These software centric companies have no incentive to interop with their competitors. It may be good for an individual corporation to maintain a walled garden, but it isn’t good for the world of communication.

Does anyone remember when you needed Trillian (or Pidgin/Gaim) to talk to all of your friends online? The situation seems worse now that it did in the days of reverse engineering the latest MSN protocol revision.
I don't understand, where's Curl.js or Require.js? Isn't modular, namespaced code a priority for any large project?
During the Renaissance and most of human history everything was male dominated, with the exception of childbirth and child are.
It’s very important that you immediately connect your Nest Protect to your Nest Account so we can remotely disable Nest Wave.

Does anyone else find that unsettlingly creepy? If they can disable some feature of their product remotely, presumably via firmware updates or a similar mechanism, isn't it not much of a stretch to assume they can disable the entire alarm remotely?
Yeah, we've played with that idea a bit. It doesn't help the sparseness problem (actually makes it worse), and if we took action as a direct result, it would give people the power to DoS content they disagree with.

For sites operating at a smaller scale, this could be a good way to surface content for manual review though.
You mean the extremely bubbly my series A-F silicon valley VC valuation billion dollar club. Also known as the $100 million of which I own 5% as a founder reality club.
Double Boil Instant Ramen to Lower the Amount of Unhealthy Palm Oil
A U.S. President, maybe, but no, certainly not a plain old CEO.
Octave is still quite primitive in comparison to MATLAB unfortunately. I think it will be some time before it reaches the level of MATLAB.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'll bite anyway: What rational reason do you have for desiring the criminalization of any sort of sexual activity between two consenting adults, in the privacy of their own home?
Suppose you program a simple robot (say, like a Neato) to try to move around while vacuuming and avoiding obstacles. It follows a purely deterministic program. Now suppose you have another robot controlled purely with a quantum-level source of randomness (say, it turns to the left each time a particle decays). Would the second robot really be more free? I think not. Intuitively, what we call "free will" seems proportional to the ability of an entity to interact with its environment in a complex way.
Most of the big "enterprise" OLTP databases are designed this way; the less portable they are, the more likely they are doing deep bypass optimizations. DB2, SQL Server, and similar are bypass designs. Oracle used to be a weird hybrid, due to portability requirements, but since they took control of the hardware I would assume recent versions are mostly pure bypass.

Most commercial analytical databases are not bypass, due in large part to the fact that most of them are based on Postgres, ironically.
Just because CS people have a tendency to vastly overestimate their qualifications in other fields doesn't mean uniformed speculation about an incredibly well-discussed topic in philosophy is appropriate for HackerNews.
How so? What if the church prevented some research while allowing other? At the end of the day, there might have been some research but the church still would have prevented progress.

> The new secular darling Bruno was not a scientist

How so?
I agree, there's something to be said in many cases for marketing to new customers with those services. But those restaurants should have both- high-fee marketplace services for discoverability, and reasonably priced online ordering of their own for loyal customers and when directing customers online. No restaurant should have to tell people the only way to order online is to find them on a site buried under every competitor in town- unless they pay big extra commissions to float to the top.
The Most Frequently Used ConnectrixCommands for Cisco and Brocade SAN switch
Would there be such outrage over Eich's resignation had he donated to KKK or an anti-Semite group? Just curious.
I gave in and ordered a bidet a year ago. Not wanting to commit to some of the expensive options, I opted for the $25 Astor Bidet:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TPGPUW/

Installation involved adding a T-adapter to my sink's cold water line. The whole setup takes about 5-10 minutes if you know what you're doing, or about 30 if you don't. Even if you know nothing about plumbing, you can install this thing with some patience (and probably in well under an hour).

I've been very happy overall. There are lots of similar bidets for varying prices, but the core functionality can be had for $25. I haven't felt the desire to spend any more, this thing just works.

We go through a lot less toilet paper, though we still use some for the drying. This may be too much information, but I do feel subjectively much cleaner. When we travel somewhere without a bidet, it's definitely on the edge of my mind that I miss my setup at home.

I do get weird looks when we have company, but who cares. Continue smearing poop on your butts, heathens.
You don't need to go Toto. There are Korean companies that make bidets that (in my opinion) are just as good, but are more affordable.

Bio Bidet is one of them (BB1000). Stateside, there's Brondell (I recommend the Swash1000) but my preference is for Bio Bidet.
Ouch, I wonder if the fix will be to pull the feature. Kind of a bummer but I can understand there's probably a huge liability issue when it comes to smoke alarms.
A simple solution is to build a service atop tarsnap - just as it builds atop AWS.

The purpose of a small business isn't always to make money, or to provide the best possible service - it can be to create your own job, that you love, that is the perfect job for you.

DHH talks about this.

There's a Reader's Digest story about a guy fishing all day, and an entrepreur tells him he should hire people, increase prices, do marketing etc. Why? So he can retire, and spend all day fishing! But that's what he does now...

That said, there's some good ideas about how to get money out of customers in the article, if that's your priority.
In other words, a smoke-emitting smoke alarm?
I'd wager that the average anti-gay marriage voter in the US does not go to the poll for the purpose of voting to oppose gay marriage. They go to vote for an elected office, or because they were told that it's their duty to vote, and then they see a proposition on the ballot and tick whichever box is against gay marriage. They do this without much thought and based primarily on the views of the community they are immersed in. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
More or less so than actually casting a vote?
Yeah, underscore was there but date wasn't. I guess my point was that there wasn't a date.js or some reasonable equivalent time library because date/time programming sucks.
Very cool! Thanks for contributing this.
You can get copies from the Archives for research purposes but it isn't cheap. I forget how much it cost when I was last there doing research. Also, they probably wouldn't grant permission for the purpose of making t-shirts, just my guess...=)
You don't even know if you disagree with this person about marriage equality, but here we are talking about the KKK.
Japanese baths are great, too - you can wash your body before getting into the tub, so you're not stewing in your own filth.
Sigh...really?

Look, for many cultures - marriage aren't about love (or aren't solely about love) - this is very much a Western/modern thing.

For them, marriages are part of society - a married couples has responsibilities to the society.

And the family unit, and raising children are a big part of it.

You need to look outside your own experiences.

That's what I don't get about this whole fracas.

You have all these people on HN screaming and jumping up and down, saying EICHS IS A BIGOT! ONLY MY VIEWPOINT IS CORRECT! IT'S SO OBVIOUS?!!!!

Well, if they were as "big-minded" as they claim, then they'd see that there many people with differing opinions to you. Shock!

I think this poster said it best (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526663)

Don't support welfare? You're against poor people.
Support welfare? You're against the working man.
You're pro-choice? You're against babies.
You're pro-life? You're against women.
Or go one level down - I'd pay for a good OCR library and a good summarization library. The current OCR offerings are too difficult to get working well, and summarization tech is way too specialized at the moment.
Get to be an exec at Nintendo or Sony and you might feel differently!
I installed the servers in the rack at the data center, configured the load balancers, installed and configured the database with a hot backup and wrote 90%+ of the application code when we went live. You don't need people with all that much experience.
Well, he didn't say he regrets his actions from 6 years ago. It's kind of like adultery. If I cheated on you 6 years ago but never apologized for it or expressed regret for it, should you feel comfortable with me today? What if I wasn't clear about whether I believe adultery is okay? What if I wasn't clear about whether I am still committing adultery?

The beliefs he holds are still current, as far as anyone can tell. If they aren't, I'm sure he would have said so.

This is technically true, but the way such an idea was applied in this case lacks something of the spirit of free speech in a truly tolerant and open society.

Yeah, some gay rights activists were a bit over the top and maybe should try a bit harder to understand the other side. But it is an emotional issue. If I feel that somebody is trying to use the might of the government to take away my rights, it's going to be difficult to sympathize with and understand why they would do that.