skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a long conversation with my Chinese professor about the pros/cons of learning Chinese if you have 0 background vs. if you have some background (I was born in China, moved to US when I was 6). Both are biases one can push past, but good to think about as you're learning.

The Rules (e.g., grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc.)

If you have 0 background you are a blank slate, and like a blank slate, you can absorb whatever the teacher throws at you. Provided you work hard, have natural language ability, etc. etc., this means you'll likely be better at me than grammar, syntax, vocabulary, etc. Why? Because my frame of reference is that of a 6 year old speaking elementary Chinese. Whenever I'm uncertain, or whenever my parents are uncertain (i.e., they're not sure I'll understand what they're saying), the default is to regress to this very elementary way of speaking.

The Feelings

On the other hand, if you have 0 background, it will be very difficult to master the tonality to perfection and the nuances of what "sounds right." For example, if you were really pedantic, you'd know that the appropriate pronunciation for the Eight Trigrams is not ba1 gua4 (as is commonly spoken) but ba2 gua4. But... no one uses the rigorously correct way anymore, and it's this sense of what's right that almost seems to be absorbed via osmosis that the person with a background will have a better control of.
There is such a list, but there is almost nothing on it. At this point we could probably get rid of it, since it was only created when the site was being overwhelmed—I mean front-page-entirely-about-one-thing overwhelmed—and that deluge has since receded.

From that, you can probably guess the entire list. :)
> something that is very destructive to religious belief

I think history's greatest logical thinkers would beg to differ with you. The history books are always trying to be rewritten by someone BUT religious thought has driven this critical thinking and logic for millennial. Also explain why more people are Christians now then ever? Percentage and Numbers???
A suggestion, assuming the author reads HN: One very basic game mechanic that is so far missing is strategies for collision detection. I would be quite interested to see interactive examples (and code examples) that do a good job of covering that topic.
...linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum claim that utterances such as "They invited Sandy and I" are "heard constantly in the conversation of people whose status as speakers of Standard English is clear"; and that "Those who condemn it simply assume that the case of a pronoun in a coordination must be the same as when it stands alone. Actual usage is in conflict with this assumption."

It may take me some time to calm down after reading that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
This is off-topic, but one of my favorite essays in English that deals with Chinese culture is this one by David Moser on Chinese "stand-up comedy":
http://www.danwei.org/tv/stifled_laughter_how_the_commu.php

This essay, alongside a post on Quora by Dashan, one of the most famous foreigners in China for his frequent appearance on Chinese TV, sheds light on aspects of a traditional Chinese performance art that many native Chinese may not have a clear idea about. Dashan's Quora post is linked from the first comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117473
Another downvote by an anonymous coward for a perfectly reasonable comment? Sometimes I just have to shake my head at HN :)
Snowden Asks Putin About Surveillance On Russian TV
My first job out of college was at a large investment bank. As a trader, I spent much of my time on the phone. I remember discovering that we paid several hundreds of dollars a month for those lines. The contract was signed in the seventies and nobody had thought to revisit it.

That is a story about how sensible constructs drift apart over time. Splitting costs into line items is difficult and expensive. Sometimes it isn't worth the hassle. If the HHS overpaid for email but underpaid for something else, that is okay for now. Cost-effectiveness should be calculated on the aggregate for complex contracts.
My friends and I have a game where someone points to something, and everybody else has to quickly come up with an artists statement. The most preposterous yet sellable one wins. Often they sound like the one you quoted.
VC is hardly an investment category full of good returns at all.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/05/07/how-venture...

And given that VC returns tend to be based on a small number of long tail hits, I have no idea how you could say "risk has little to do with it".
>To install sysdig via apt we will need to setup the apt repository maintained by Draios the company behind sysdig. We can do this by running the following curl commands.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=743819 is the ITP for Debian, the package should at least be in Sid now.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=all&searchon=names&k... shows it hasn't been imported into Ubuntu yet.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=fedora-r... means it isn't in Fedora yet, either - although finding out about packaging seems to be really tricky.
The fact that you just started a pointed, partisan political subthread in an otherwise boring metathread isn't at all evidence that HN should avoid politics. No, I don't see how anyone could come to that conclusion.
A little torn about this. Reading through the comments, and kind of agree that the project is an interesting representation of hacker culture, and certainly stimulating/ morale-boosting to work on...

But on the other hand, I'm just a little bit sad that some clearly intelligent people have put time toward this problem instead of pressing issues like hunger or violence or any other number of social problems that are present all over the Valley and the US, not to mention the rest of the world. Secondly, every time I read an article about "using the bathroom for 1 less minute will save in total X years of your life!" I think about Wall-E and how much I don't care for that level of efficiency.

Alright I'll get off my box, because I'm sure this was a harmless and fun post, but this was just an honest statement of what I thought. I wrote about this (i.e., and get up on the soapbox with a loudspeaker) much more in-depth in case anyone is curious (or thinks I'm crazy) FYI: https://medium.com/business-startup-development-and-more/64d...
"You'd think that's all anyone should care about, but unfortunately that's not the case" - Totally disagree. You don't get to decide what other people care about. And I would confidently wager that virtually everyone is affected by things that so-called purists dismiss as not worth caring about. The notion that there is a concrete boundary between the art and the context is so simplistic, and it completely ignores basic psychology. Doesn't it seem a little narcissistic to think that you would know what other people should care about?
Who are they paying $146 / month for email?
Honestly I think JavaScript is about as good as any other mainstream dynamic language, save the Lisps, for FP. I'm currently writing a functional language and compiling to JavaScript, for the precise reason that it's a very straightforward translation. It's certainly much better at it than Python, although I consider Python vastly superior in almost every other respect. However, I think that FP in a dynamic language is very difficult because of the lack of typing. In Haskell you can write incredibly intricate and expressive single-liners that would be 10 lines in another language (if you could do them at all), and are only really feasible because of the typing system (as in, it would require almost a miracle to get them right without a type system backing you up). I suppose Lisp people manage to get away with it, but on the other hand Lisp isn't really functional the way the ML family of languages are.

As far as the data structures not being there, well, keep in mind that JavaScript is based on imperative languages; hence its focus on arrays and hash tables (both of which are almost always implemented mutably). Also, mutability is baked into the DOM, and short of doing everything in a monad, that looks to be the way it's going to be, so again, it makes sense that JS was written as it was. When immutability is needed, use a library -- or just don't use JavaScript.
Def programming
I'm seeing this in the programming world, with multiple threads and repos just based on Styling. When or where do we draw the line? I'm fine with amending the guides to fit the new styles, but come on... We have so many!
The problem is taxes are incredibly complicated. There are companies that do "tax as a service"[1].

Governments should pass tax laws in some sort of industry standard tax rules specification[2]. This way, companies and the open source world can write rules engines to process taxes and online stores can pick among the competitors, not having to worry about the complexities themselves. Costs are reduced, competition increased, and consumers win.

[1] http://www.avalara.com/

[2] this might also make taxes simpler. If legislators can't encode (compile) it, they can't legislate it!
I had originally hoped that fair terms and a desire not to leave money on the table would have brought all content to all streaming services, but I mostly revised that opinion after reading comments like those of Eric Kessler:

http://techland.time.com/2011/12/01/hbo-boss-to-netflix-youl...

There are unique hurdles in negotiating fair terms with every content owner simultaneously. Transaction costs are abundant, and some people just don't want to work with you.
Prix immobilier : le Crédit Agricole table sur une baisse de 3 % cette année
Découvrez les prévisions du Crédit Agricole pour le marché de l’immobilier cette année. Les prix des logements devraient enregistrer une baisse de 3 %.
I agree that Amazon is often the most convenient option. But their prices simply aren't the best any more (at least for things other than books). Try a price comparison next time and see if you agree! (Another change is that Google Shopping has improved a lot over the last few years, so price comparison is less painful as well.)

One thing Amazon still does best: their deliveries arrive on time, and seem a lot less likely to get stuck in UPS limbo.
The OpenSSL codebase is already pretty modular, but it's not very clean, and that's its major issue. Needless to say, it could be made even more modular, with the crypo code, X.509 code, the SSL/TLS protocol implementation, &c., entirely separated from one another, but doing that will still benefit from pulling out as much cruft as possible. They're ripping out all that stuff because it's more hard to test stuff that can just go wrong, and when it comes to critical security infrastructure, that's a bad thing to have lying around.

All they really need to do to maintain compatibility is maintain the same API. And they're doing just that. In fact, it's in their best interests to maintain the same API as deviating in any significant way is just going to complicate porting software that uses OpenSSL over to use their implementation. So long as they do that, there's little to worry about.

And maybe some day their fork will end up becoming the dominant SSL/TLS implementation, much as OpenSSH became the dominant SSH implementation.
Dacia tire la croissance de Renault en affichant une santé éclatante 
Analysez les causes du succès durable de Dacia, la filiale roumaine low-cost du groupe Renault, qui affiche d’excellents chiffres de vente dans le monde.
"Do"
Oops! You're most definitely right about that. Toyota is still making robots. Sony isn't.
FIO Is A Simple, Attractive Time Zone Tracker
No share point does not store history. Get a file above a certain size, and that magically just stops working.

Every time I've seen share point used, everyone described it the same way. Its where documents go to die.

So far at the current gig a share point "upgrade" has meant that all our fun use of the old install is useless. All of the sudden wikis look more useful.

Burn me once and all that. Oh and search, yeah that search is about as useful as altavista was back in the day.
I find it disheartening that this "hyper-skeptical" brand of pseudo-intellectualism has taken hold in certain circles. Suppressing imagination and foresight in favor of a cold reverence to facts is misguided. Creativity and vision (along with need) is the driver of scientific progress; you cannot have one without the other. So dismissing thought experiments and speculation as "meaningless juxtaposition of words" is utterly missing the point of everything that has been accomplished by scientific progress thus far.

It doesn't take much of a leap at all in fact to realize that uploading one's consciousness to a virtual world is very plausible. If the meaningful stuff of consciousness is information rather than matter, it is in fact a certainty. Of course, questions of whether you're uploading your consciousness rather than a copy abound, but I think there are solutions to even that issue (which I've discussed here: http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/237qqj/kurzweils...)
The biggest sales uptick -- 61 percent for big-ticket items -- went to merchants that use Amazon Marketplace...That means Amazon still indirectly benefits, since it collects a fee from merchants on its marketplace.

Not sure why they buried this at the end of the article. Amazon can still attract price-conscious shoppers by funneling them to marketplace sellers that don't collect sales tax, and can now invest in more fulfillment centers and other initiatives that require nexus (Amazon Fresh, etc.)
Yes, and something very similar used to be called Microsoft Surface (for example, see http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/web/digital-home/home...)
I'll gladly pay an additional 6-10% to keep avoiding Wal-mart or Target or even Home Depot. There are people like me who just really hate having to suit up and go shopping. I don't like the traffic, I don't like getting ripped off, and I don't find in-store shopping a fun or magical experience like some do.

I can pull up Amazon and read ratings/reviews, see what kind of problems people ran into with products, and make a reasonably informed decision with my money.

In a big box store, I feel like I'm taking more of a chance unless I stop, scan the barcode, read through reviews. Meanwhile, I look like a silly guy who can't make up his mind.

Yes, I enjoy obsessively comparing reviews/ratings for potential purchases. Even the really cheap/insignificant ones...
I disagree. Ease of retrieval of information is one thing, signal to noise ratio is also important. For every 'superstition' being destroyed on the Internet there are (e.g.) a plethora of people reposting the discredited "NASA space pen" meme, smugly ending discussions with "correlation does not imply causation, so you're wrong" and other thought-terminating cliches, and enthusiastically engaging in echo-chamber communities that only seek to reinforce existing biases.

Good information has always taken work to obtain. The Internet cannot compensate for intellectual laziness, it can only magnify the effectiveness of the efforts of those willing to exercise discernment and look at things with a critical eye.
I can pretty much guarantee that this is some government contracting company taking advantage of the government's quirks to overcharge. Not some oversight in a contract no one has reviewed in 20 years.
Google searches qualified with site:news.ycombinator.com often turn up the permalink pages for individual comments rather than the original post itself. Could you set rel="canonical" on comment permalink pages to point back to the original post?
Super excited about this year. I'm implementing the new Internet Printing Protocol over USB standard for Linux.
I love these interactive demos of game dev techniques. Another great one is this Aztez post on fighting game effects - http://aztez.com/blog/2014/01/06/anatomy-of-a-successful-att... - and Vlambeer's demo in their 'art of screenshake' talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
If you've ever worked for or with the government this isn't shocking news. In fact I also wouldn't be surprised to find that their email is also unreliable.

There just isn't much accountability with these things it's a HUGE problem. I don't know what the solution is.
This is an interesting article, and the comments are even more interesting, highlighting other similar scenarios that have happened around the world.

I'm more curious if we think we'll learn from these and in the future try to make better decisions (which hopefully means we'll avoid production in the first place, which means... well, I live in a Disney world sometimes OK?). Sometimes it's depressing how short term the collective memory of humanity seems to be, what with bubbles and crises repeating themselves every couple of generations.
Risk has little to do with it for the top firms (like Sequoia) that have built the networks and reputation to attract the top companies. Yes, they take some risk on individual companies, but across their entire portfolio the risk is not that great compared to the expected value. The VC industry is winner take-the-best, just like the tech industry as a whole. The top firms are not taking risk proportional to their reward.

It is true that the VC sector underperforms. That is because the lower tier firms are just pretenders. They are funding second tier companies, and second tier companies are not good enough in these winner-take-most markets. These firms should shut down and limited partners should stop burning their money by investing in them.

My disagreement with Piketty (judging from the summaries - I haven't read him yet), is that the cause of inequality is not capital versus labor. The cause is the rise of winner-take-all-dynamics, which causes stratification within sectors.
It’s Official: 2013 Was the Busiest Year Yet for Cyber Criminals
This is what Django does. Works very well.
I like how page 2 wasn't loading.
This does seem the most important conclusion. What's likely happening is Amazon is no longer showing themselves as the top seller in some cases. Consumers are still buying on Amazon, but from a different seller, who does not charge sales tax.

What would be impressive is if Amazon made an (algorithmic) judgment call, and showed price-sensitive shoppers that would otherwise go elsewhere the cheaper seller, and shoppers that would tolerate the tax the (presumably higher profit) Amazon offering.
There's some data on the FY2011 contracts available here

http://www.hhs.gov/grants/servicecontractsfy11.html

CSV (a few mb): http://www.hhs.gov/grants/hhsfy11scinventory-c.csv
I think he's referring to when they made sure that "plays for sure" drm license/authentication/whatever servers got shut down so all the music you bought became a bunch of bits in a bucket.
Meaningful Activities Protect the Brain From Depression
What is what is the differece between iPhone Jailbreaking and Unlocking
This can help you figure out what is the difference between iPhone Jailbreaking and unlocking
> Amazon supports federal legislation that would explicitly let states require tax collections by all online retailers above a certain size.

This would give Amazon a huge competitive advantage (given their existing infrastructure). Of course they support this.
I found the following tutorials on collision helpful:

http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/04/06/physics-engines-f...

http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2011/04/20/collision-detecti...
HN does not have only to do with tech and startups. That's the reason why PG changed its name from "Startup News" ages ago. Chemical weapons in the Baltic Sea are an example of something (potentially, at least) interesting that might well be at home on the site. (Why there were two stories is a separate issue.) Another example is the Chinese irrigation system from the third century BC currently on the front page. Such a story is emphatically on topic for HN.

Political stories aren't necessarily off-topic either. However, they come with the risk of degenerating into flamewars that violate HN's values. We can't afford to let that happen very much because it will change the community for the worse. How do we know that? Because it already has.

The question of "politics on HN" is not primarily about defining what is/isn't on topic. It's empirical and practical: under certain influences, the site degenerates badly. Therefore, lessen such influences.

We have a good definition of "degenerate": to violate HN's values. And we know what our values are: intellectual substance and personal civility. (The other thing we talk a lot about is signal/noise ratio, but you can derive that from the other two.)
Awesome! That looks nice. Thanks for taking feedback.
Yes. I read the site, as I said. Reposting the text from there is kind of pointless, no?

I don't ultimately care one way or another - it was meant as friendly feedback that it's unclear right now. You'll notice that quite a few of the comments also said something to the effect of "I guess it does this". Which means it's not entirely clear what it does to more people than just me.
Piketty need not wait for the return of patrimonial capitalism for democratic and meritocratic institutions to be undermined by elite economic interests: that ostrich has already taken off, that horse has bolted, that rising tsunami has already smashed all boats.

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...
There's a pretty big difference between sound proofing your office and giving your wife unfettered access to the corporate network.
Wow! I remember doing this to my and my friends' 4-function calculators in 5th grade! This was actually how I learned how LCDs worked.

You can also remove the reflective sticker on the back of the black and white LCD, to make it transparent where it was previously reflective. That's how I made my calculator work with our classroom's overhead projector. (and some really interesting pranks)
From the report:

Our data consist of daily transactions for 2,807,476 households from January 1, 2012 to
December 31, 2013, and include both banking (i.e., checking, savings, and debit card) and credit
card transactions. We observe the date, amount, and description of each transaction.

I'm a little disturbed that they had access to complete transaction information for roughly 2% of American households. Is it common practice for banks to share this data? Surely date + amount + description is personally identifiable in many situations.
In this area I find the writings of Eliezer Yudkowsky particularly insightful. Definitions are what he calls "disguised queries." When someone says "atheism is a religion" or "that's not art," they're trying to use the definition to make another statement - that atheists rely on faith, or that the work is not worthy of praise, display, etc.

The problem is that set membership isn't always binary, and not all members of a set share all the same characteristics. Just because something isn't difficult technically, doesn't mean it's not art. More importantly, if you're using "not art" to mean "not difficult technically," then saying "this isn't difficult technically, so it's not art" isn't a worthwhile statement. It's the disguised implications of the word "art" which make such statements so contentious. To paraphrase Eliezer, the argument about what is and isn't art is really a dispute over whether to infer art-related qualities of the work, like fitness for a museum. A dictionary is of no use here.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/
Is the US an Oligarchy? Not So Fast.
A lot of talk around Beacons and the promise of 'Low Energy', without that much factual data around the amount of power they source from your smartphone battery mostly.