skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps. I do remember fiddling with an XP machine in an attempt to whittle it down, years ago; this was a tool I have considered. It may not be very practical though: someone with good understanding of both XP and business requirements needs to modify and test the image, which costs a lot of time. Unless you have hundreds of XP workstations (or loads of free time), I wouldn't bother.

Alas, I wouldn't go that way now, unless I really, really had no other sane choice but stay with XP. That was the case in 2005, but not today (I understand the case for embedded systems and/or specialized SW; this is generally not the case for most users - and "we absolutely need IE" is, thankfully, no longer a majority issue).
This article hits my two pet peeves.

Anyone who believes a person's rights should extend beyond the point at which they infringe on the rights of others is not worth listening to.

Also, please don't use the term 'meritocracy'. Ever. Are you referring to the idea of rubber stamping people for positions of power based on their parents ability to pay for for the most expensive university courses and degrees? No, I didn't think so.
Facebook CPC – Don't Waste Your Money
Please don't. Rather pick something like "Compiler Construction" from Niklaus Wirth and learn how to write compilers using memory safe system programming languages.

http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/CBEAll.pdf
nice one i like it
Startup Hubs Are Heating Up Outside the U.S.
You have to differentiate between individuals deciding for themselves to go elsewhere and organized boycotts designed to ruin a person. I would hate to be a minority business owner in a society that condoned flippant use of organized boycotts.
This actually perfectly qualifies as being open source.
Why does lying inspire confidence in you? You don't appear to account for that he can hold a view that opposes same-sex marriage and also want to continue doing his job. Why is that not allowed in USA?
This is awesome, I will certainly be using this to learn more Lisp.
Microsoft Copies Canonical's Convergence Idea, Cripples It
It can be fairly reliably assumed at this point that someone opposing gay marriage is a devout something-or-other.
Could you tell me something about the difference between Xtend and Groovy. To me, Xtend looks like Groovy with a stricter syntax, and instead of directly translating to Java byte code, it gets transalted to Java source first.
AFAIK Mozilla is based in Mountain View, California, where (according to your infographic) it is indeed illegal to fire someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Not sure if that also applies to remote workers who live in other states, though.
Your point contradicts itself; first you mention that marriage is about biological reproduction (which would annul marriages between infertile couples?), then you say it's about society and culture, then you say it's about objective facts.
Ask HN: Please help us with our Nigerian domains
Brief history: We (3 developers) reserved a bunch of Nigerian domains when they came available last year and thought we would develop something on them. During the past year we failed miserably to allocate time to do anything to this and now the domains are expiring within 2 weeks, on the 15th-16th of April.

To be honest with ourselves, we really don't see ourselves doing any better during the next year on our own. Thus we have pretty much conceded to the loss of the initial registration fees and are thinking of just letting the domains expire.

It still feels like a waste to let this great collection of domains expire though, so any advice on what to do with the domains would be greatly appreciated:

boati.ng
bowli.ng
cycli.ng
danci.ng
fighti.ng
fishi.ng
golfi.ng
hiki.ng
hiri.ng
painti.ng
raci.ng
ranki.ng
saili.ng
spanki.ng
swi.ng

The renewal of these domains would cost us USD 218.90 per domain on our registrar 101domain.com, totalling USD 3502.40. This is a lot more than we initially anticipated the renewal would cost and in our current life situations we just are not prepared to reinvest that sum, even though there clearly is some potential with these domains.

Even the thought of donating the domains to “good use” before they expire has crossed our minds. We just don't really see how we should actually go about arranging this without having to take the risk of ending up paying the renewal fees ourselves in this short timeframe.

What should we do?
It still feels, like a character assassination. Lots of great men were fucking weird... Hell most of us are really fucking weird. Gratefully most people today don't emphasize.

Mozzart had a fetish for shit, which he extensively exchanged with his cousin. Imagine someone squatting a big chunky shit on your shit each time you hear his music.

Einstein was for lack of better world a whore. He had sex with bunch of his cousin from his maternal and paternal side. He slept with his cousin, her sister and early slept with cousin Elsa's daughter.

Tesla had a fetish for pigeons, thought he could talk with aliens and was afraid of germs more than anything else. And he had OCD to top it all off.
Tolerance exists precisely for things which you hate. If you reserve tolerance for the unimportant issues, then you are intolerant.
Changing majors in the US is very common. I don't have any numbers but I'd guess 30-50% of all US college students have changed their major at least once.
My feelings as well. I just looked into it as a possible language for Android development given the stagnation on Java compliance on the platform, but Kotlin looks much better suited for it given Google's investment into InteliJ.
> I see what you are aiming at, but the conclusion of clinical trials is almost never that simple.

Yes, that's the problem with study subjects as complex as humans :) My academic background is in educational science and things are even fuzzier there: there never is a simple treatment->result relation because the persons receiving treatment reflect on that treatment, they are an active part in it.

> In other words, it won't help laymen in the end.

I think I know what you're meaning, but that's the point where I disagree: In my opinion this is no either/or situation but rather a question of relative amount of insight that can be given to laymen: Currently they will usually understand 0% of the scientific abstract. If we assume that a laymen's version of that abstract loses 80% of the information but is 100% understandable, that would still be a win.

> Plus, you don't need that laymen language in the first place. Isn't that the job of journalists who cover scientific discoveries ?

Absolutely, as journalists are already used to do exactly that. In practice the result will probably be exactly that: the institution will have science journalists who will produce these laymen's abstracts.
> They talked extensively about how brain chemicals work and how medications help to balance out those chemicals

The only problem with this is that it's essentially a PR line that both doctors and the general public have mistaken for science. We don't know all that many facts about how brain chemicals work with regard to mood disorders. We have empirical results from clinical trials and broad use of antidepressant and antipsychotic medications, but there is no basis to believe that medications "balancing out those chemicals" serve to repair mood disorders.

If the medications helped, then great, I know they have helped a great number of people, but they also fail to help a great number more and these success stories have an unfortunate tendency to marginalize people that do not get good results from medication. It often results in victim-blaming, to make sufferers of depression wrong for stopping their medications for legitimate reasons (let's face it, all of these results are highly subjective), and for overstating the ability of our current medications to cure all mental ills.
I'm willing to bet that they provide site licenses, where everyone in an entire university's subnet range might have access. In an open access journal, it shouldn't matter, but many journals are hosted on the same few platforms, and the spider trap is a feature of the platform.
As far as I know, US laws require that the `x` number of trials demonstrate the effectiveness of the drug and failured dont need to be reported.

That is not correct. When you submit an NDA to the FDA, you need to include every piece of clinical trial data you've obtained so far. This includes trials that you've either ended early or failed to show any effect at all.

The FDA doesn't look kindly upon a company that hides any clinical trial data.

How many years exactly does one need to subvert the market so that a satisfactory level of innovation is maintained ?

We have some data on that, but we can't predict the future. I can't find the stat right now, but only about 1 in 3 drugs approved by the FDA actually produce an overall positive return.
FWIW I don't disagree with you, was just speculating about why people in tech don't think they need a union.
If the only thing that is not tolerated is intolerance, intolerance will cease to exist.
I think spending any time on this sort of thing is next to worthless. You're better off just reaching out to a small handful of actual customers directly with your time.
Opower IPO today
I'm sorry, but this is fatuous.

Only the most recent declarations of human rights have included any provisions about sexual orientation at all. The UN declaration was in 1948 - hardly a friendly time for homosexuals. The US bill of rights was held widely, really until the Civil War, to enshrine - implicitly in its provisions on private property - property in people. LGBT people have had to fight hard even to get to the point where gay marriage is even thinkable, let alone considered a fundamental human right, partly because "it's a human rights issue" is question-begging in the extreme. What's your definition of human rights? I bet Brendan Eich's is different. You won't prove one or the other from first principles, I guarantee you.

What we have here, with this little brouhaha, is political bikeshedding. Gay marriage is hard. We just got it in this country (the UK), almost 50 years after homosexual acts were first partially decriminalised. In the US, it seems to be a matter to force through on a tedious state-by-state basis. The obstacles to doing so are huge - because millions of Americans (and millions of British, etc), well organised in right-wing pressure groups and militant churches, consider homosexuality to be depraved and sinful.

Meanwhile, in the tech world, people are generally upping their consciousness on this issue and others. Good. But this is not a problem individuals scattered around an industry can solve. It's a matter for political movements of concerned citizens and always has been.

But there's Brendan Eich. We know very well he donated a whole thousand dollars to the campaign for a cruel, vindictive law (although only because somebody dug it out of CA state records - not because he's on record stating his views). He is in a prominent and vulnerable position of influence - on our turf. Heck, he's in the Valley! We may not be able to do anything about victims of homophobia in West Texas, but we can do something about Brendan Eich. And doing something, apparently, is always better than doing nothing.

Yes, Eich's opinions are vile, and he should be challenged to drop them. But he's not the problem. If he has conducted himself in a bigoted way in his many years as CTO, then that would disqualify him - probably under state or federal law, never mind the morality of it. If not, then there is no material difference whatsoever to LGBT people at Mozilla - any more than there are to LGBT contributors to ES6 or whatever. Don't worry about right-wing hackers who keep their opinions on the quiet and on the side. Worry about the televangelists, the tea party and the rest who breed bigotry to scale.
My neighbor actually had a funeral for his Tamagotchi (plural, I assume it's the same) before going to summer camp. I don't think that did anything good or bad to him, it just happened.

But on topic, I really don't think Siri is doing any kind of special harm to kids, and as always in situations like these, it's really on the parents to meter the use of potentially harmful things by kids. Siri is just a tool, just like Grand Theft Auto is just a game, and not all things are meant for everyone.
Technical aspects are almost irrelevant.

For me, it's about the ecosystem. I do a fair bit of work on the CLR and JVM.

The JVM has the following advantages: open source, cross platform, free tooling[1], incredibly more mature 3rd party libraries, zero OS cost to deploy, architectures ready to roll out of the box.

A lot of the Java stuff I do is literally integrating some off the shelf bits that work 100% reliably first time and it's done. Compare to C# where I end up having to do a lot of leg work and navigating immature, abandoned or just broken open source projects.

[1] By the time I've bought VS Pro 2013 with MSDN, ANTS profiler, NCover, VisualSVN, I'm down a pile of cash.
It can be used with dot42 - C# to Android compiler.
Visual Studio Express can't.
It's used consistently in the core language and in well written packages but very inconsistently across the ecosystem. I certainly don't use it in packages I write for my own use and it's pretty unused in most of the packages I download.
I know registrar that register at the rate of about $100 per domain.

Maybe transfer them to halve the cost and seek to sell them afterwards?

You may email me if you want introductions to the registrar

Cheers!
Very true, but I've not heard any news that he didn't have the support of his employees, or that he wasn't inspiring confidence in them. His position was made untenable by the actions of people outside of his charge.

I would think that your point applies if Mozilla had discounted Eich for the role in the first place, but it appears that his views only became an issue for them after they started receiving negative attention.

In any case, Mozilla have demonstrated quite clearly that they are not the champions of equal rights, free speech, or diversity that they claim to be. I wonder if this will be a problem for them in the long run. I think a lot of people still use their product over Chrome et al because of support for these views.
Are people still blowing this whistle?

Tolerance for people is not the same as tolerance for speech, or tolerance for actions. You are not a victim if people disapprove of your bigotry - your speech may be protected, but you are not protected from the consequences of your speech (and that includes the opinions of others).

People will find any reason to view themselves as victims when something they do or a person they agree with is criticised. That people are crying about "discrimination", because someone who actively worked to oppress people was rightly criticised for those actions, quite frankly astounds me.

Besides which, people aren't just criticising him for seeking to strip one the basic and fundamental liberties a modern society gives its citizens, purely on the basis of who they are (which he is entitled to do). They're criticising Mozilla, a company which strives towards the principles of openness and inclusiveness, for picking someone to represent them who doesn't represent the values of the organisation.
Now this is a good April Fools joke (albeit a little late)
We should not be tolerant of intolerance.
I accidentally upvoted this post. Can I undo my vote?
Don’t Let a Security Breach Kill Your Million Dollar Idea
You know what my worst nightmare was? Depression.
Scientists Dismiss Claims that Yellowstone Super-Volcano About to Erupt
I read the Sullivan piece but Sullivan (and you too, presumably) seem to think this is a First Amendment issue. I'm not understanding where his right to speak, or to act, have been limited in any way. Please explain.

Are you and Sullivan thinking that the First Amendment gives you the right to free speech and, additionally, also guarantees no response? Or maybe it guarantees that the response must be along the lines of, "oh well ... you have your opinion and I have mine ... now we'll just go on with each of us having our separate views." Does the First Amendment prevent me from having a particular response, even if the response is what you personally would consider viscous and outsized.

Again, please explain how this is a First Amendment issue?
If that were true then would you consider it right to oust Mr Eich because the company in which he only just became CEO abides by the law? Wouldn't it be more mature, and democratic, to request that the company adjusted to allow people equal benefits regardless of their beliefs about sexuality and then take action if they refuse.
> McCarthyism

Give me a break.

Why didnt you link to nazism ? or communism ? Eich is like a jew persecuted by this army of pro gay nazis ... not.

You cant expect us to take what you say seriously after that hyperbole.
Business idea: opaque contact lenses
I'm at a conference and the current speaker is boring. We just had lunch. I would very much like to sleep but I'm at the front row and that would be very rude to the speaker.

In an episode of "Broad City" the main character shows she's able to sleep with her eyes opened.

I can't do that (is it even possible?) but I would buy opaque contact lenses that would let me fake awareness, in a heartbeat.

I'm guessing many business people, many politicians, not to mention high school students, would be very interested in that product.

Can anyone make it?
Startup News sites tend to live in a bubble where a "Coming Soon" page just hacked together by 2 guys in a cafe in SF is more important than a billion dollar business elsewhere.
If it's anything like the colleges in this area, much of that money is going towards endless construction of "student life" type facilities, designed to market the campus towards visiting 17-year olds who will soon be able to mortgage away their future spending power.
Something that might be useful for you: I've heard a talk where the speaker described how F# allows defining one's own type system as an input to the compiler. The language is apparently very extendible this way. It's also open source but I can't find information about its license just now. If I were to build a custom type system that's probably where I'd start to look at, even though I'm not a .NET developer.
Well, the purpose of this project is purely to experiment with type systems, so this is far from a programming language (e.g. in a real compiler, you would want to save file/line information for AST nodes, so that the type-checker can report an error, not simply abort. Also, a compiler would not just type-infer/check the AST, but would annotate the AST with inferred types, so that they can be used in later stages (optimization, ...)). Shoot me an email if you need help with something. Also, check out [1].

> Please consider putting out a donation link so people can support your work (Bitcoin would be most convenient for me, but I'll definitely try to donate regardless).

I'd prefer comments/bugs/interesting discussion.

> Also, some kind of open source license would be great (MIT or BSD, maybe?).

I'll do that ASAP, in the meantime, it's public domain/CC-whatever, with the exception of file first_class_polymorphism/propagate.ml and propagation of types tests in first_class_polymorphism/test_infer.ml and first_class_polymorphism/test_infer.ml, which are heavily inspired by Daan Leijen's reference implementation.

[1] https://github.com/typeclassy/plzoo
He used money influence to deny homosexuals their human rights and dignity. I don't know what definition of "discrimination" we're using here, but that's pretty despicable behavior by any measure.
I find your comment somewhat confusing. As I read it, you say that your 'degree' is the subject (this is also true in the US; 'degree' can be used with exactly the same semantics as 'major') and the 'course' refers to the university you studied at. But the comment I replied to refers specifically to "one course at one university", which implies that those are separate dimensions of variation; the same course might exist at different universities. In US usage, that's not surprising; lots of colleges have e.g. a "remedial algebra" course. If 'course' refers to the subject, that's also not surprising; lots of colleges will let you earn a degree in math (though not, one hopes, if you had to take remedial algebra). But if a 'course' is defined by the university that houses it, it cannot possibly exist at more than one university.

My main point is that it's not even mildly surprising that students from Oxford should be disproportionately present in the UK government or anywhere else of significance. I have a feeling that, as important as the effect of a PPE degree may be, the effect of an Oxford degree is much stronger.

My minor point was that even after considering Oxford vs. no-name, it's not particularly surprising to see people with politics degrees going into politics.
Spam every academic email with link to "I thought you might find this paper interesting", lockout every university in the world? It only takes one click by one unsuspecting victim per institution. I wonder what would happen if someone includes that DOI in a publication reference. Watch which institutions go dark, and you know who is doing your blind review.
No, this statement is crap. If fact, kudos to him for not caving and making some malarkey confession about how he's learned and changed.
This is the reality for so many that is conveniently ignored by many posts such as this.

My major (finance) has almost nothing to do with my day to day work. But I became best friends with my cofounder our freshman year, met his high school friend and our third cofounder my sophomore year, met my wife my senior year, and utilized our university network to hire our 4th cofounder & CTO after graduation.

I've done two startups with the first two cofounders and by tapping into my wife's network found our first angel investors.

Majors and degrees are important (I'd be in a different position if I'd gone through with the switch to engineering sophomore year), but I met my wife in my final finance credit senior year. I'll take the relationships - along with a semi-practical degree.

[that is if you insist on going to school - definitely not for everyone or necessary]
The short version is that we need to do a better job distinguishing academics from job training.
What 25 Entrepreneurs wished they knew before founding their first startup
He didn't just hold a view. He actively attempted to detract happiness from the lives of others.
A CEO post have everything to do with the public perception you create of the company, though. And deservedly or not, his position coupled with his opinions on prop 8 have come to have an impact on the perception of Mozilla. In that respect, the personal views of a CEO often does have something to do with their personal views in a way that is rarely the case for less public-facing positions.
My 2 year old has learned to do this. It can be pretty amusing at times. Recently I overheard her tell Siri "I want to see pictures of Pooh, not pictures of poop".
Have you ever worked in an office full of people on the phone? When I did research for gov the policy and performance team was in an open office, right next to the benefits people. Total nightmare, got to about two o'clock and I was spent.
There have been several independent ones because they all fail. I don't fully understand the dynamics here, but the inability of the community to create a usefully working OS out of all that open code for over a decade speaks volumes.