skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, tort reform usually seeks to limit the punitive damages designed to make large institutions actually notice when they lose a lawsuit.

Without such penalties, there's a reduced incentive for administrators to notice that, say, surgeons are frequently leaving scalpels in patients. [1]

I get that people have an adverse reaction to plaintiffs striking it rich (not that they really are). But what tort reformers don't realize is that the perceived unfairness of jackpot lawsuits might actually be discouraging juries from using punitive damage amounts that would actually change corporate behavior.

We might get more appropriate incentives for businesses if we said, "Ok, the plaintiff gets made whole, even for pain and suffering, maybe the lawyers get paid, but after that, punitives go to the state." The state could use the funds to educate or prevent harms similar to whatever most of the lawsuits are about, or set up a fund to compensate others harmed by the most common dangerous practices.

It'd lead to damage awards that could actually change business behavior, fewer perceptions of unjust plaintiff enrichment, and a better balance sheet for the state or state programs designed to reduce the harms all at the same time.

[1] http://www.everydayhealth.com/healthy-living/surgeons-leave-...
The first comment at the bottom of the article is questioning the taste of using paper filters. I've often wondered this myself.

In Chicago, Intelligentsia is the main coffee joint and they brew pour over. There's definitely a lack of visible oil on the surface of the coffee like I get at home with my french press.

What do you guys think? French press or pour over?
The code itself is the "truth". The comments are commentary.

//Set x to be 4
x=5;

Which would you rather have bold and jumping out at you when skimming? Comments can be wrong because tweaks happen.
Why are punitive damages paid to the plaintiff rather than the government's general fund?
I'm just curious, where does the parent post mention anything about the build system? The "Linux style" referred to there seems to be the Linux code style, not "configure".
> punitive damages of the profits of two day's sales of coffee (which the judge reduced)

Why did the judge reduce the penalty and what is the point of the jury giving a penalty fee which the judge can reduce later?
So I guess we're just going to have a completely barren Javadoc then?
launchd makes heavy use of Mach IPC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel) ) which makes a port to any other non Mach derived OS a non trivial effort. There was apparently an effort to port it to FreeBSD - https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd and more recently https://github.com/rtyler/openlaunchd/blob/master/README.md .
In most cases the opponents are mainly opposed because of Lennart, not technical reasons, not freedom of choice, but because of Lennart. Most of them will explain their reason with refences to technical or freedom of choice but once you get down to it, its just Lennart.

You know what your average user wants? A faster booting system. In most cases that will be systemd.
Forget the average user, can you explain in detail how you envision this to work and be administrated at a network level?

So I'm a packet, leaving my computer...what happens now and what laws govern me?

So for the NN supporters have been very high on rhetoric and appalling low on details, which is always a prescription for legislative disaster.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724840
The easy way to do this is to use the changing of the value of the search field to trigger searches instead of caring about keystrokes at all.

Of course you probably don't want to send every single change either but thats beyond the scope of this comment. :)
All the 787 flights to and from North America
If You Can't Express Yourself By Email, You're Not Worthy of Anyone's Time
To me, this is a terrible example, because it's a useless comment. The comment should explain what "x" is for, not what you're doing to it. I you have a comment about what "x" is for, which becomes more important? The assignment, or the explanation?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=unix+time+1400000000
1st world problems - some people have obviously never had to debug on a 3 inch thick printout on fan fold paper where he only highlighting was the highlight pens you used.
Is there are real advantage to have this running on the device? Why not use lower profile hardware like electric imp and run everything in the cloud?
These "<blank> is wrong" or "you're doing <whatever> wrong" titles are tedious. Tell me about the better one you've written or STFU.
I'd much rather have the `x=5` jump out at me, because the example comment is entirely redundant. However, if the example was

// removing this will cause a segfault because ...
x=5;

then I would rather have the comment jump out at me.
What is the difference between consul and serf? The top-level explanation is very similar.
God save us from software that bends over backwards to help average users. The only thing worth doing with software is pushing it forward.
According to each distribution's documentation, Debian switched to dash in 2011 with Squeeze[0] whereas Ubuntu switched in 2006[1]

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/Shell

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh
Hey Luke,

I'd recommend applying for http://taskforce.is and sending Sina an email(his contact details are available on the application form). Ask for access to our mailing list and shoot off a group message, we have a wide ranged of politically devout developers.
Cannot agree enough. I have ordered the T440s and after playing 2 days with it I sent it back and started a hunt for a T430s. I was lucky to get one through a distributor where it was used for demonstration.

For me the absolute no-go was the lack of physical trackpoint buttons - as I am a trackpoint user and normally always switch off the trackpads. So on the T440s (and I believe on all the new Thinkpad series) if you switch the trackpad off you do not have buttons any more (under Linux)! WTF! And if you switch it on, then the click on the virtual buttons is moving the mouse cursor when you try to click on it! It drew me absolute crazy. Even under Windows, where the virtual button support is better, the use is way more unergonomic than before (for example you cannot anymore keep the thumbs on the buttons and click by pressure - now you have to lift and then press the thumbs). Unlike other Thinkpad users I actually like the feel of the new keyboards, but Lenovo managed even there to screw things up, with every model: On the 30s (T430) they forgot the spaces between groups of 4 F-Keys. In the 440 they have them, but they screwed up the trackpoint-buttons. And on the new X1 Carbon they do not have F-Keys anymore at all! I still do not understand how they could screw up the most distinctive characteristics of the Thinkpads (absolute best keyboards, absolute best trackpoint + accessible design).

I hope they will wake up.
All people using browsers on a modern OS support it. I've still got about 9% of traffic on Windows XP.
Could you maybe explain your reasoning for that one?

I'd be for much stronger data controls, and that might rule something like that out just as collateral damage. Fair enough, it's not a very strong principle if you violate it the minute something you approve of comes along.

That said, I'm vastly more creeped out by the idea of someone collecting email addresses and looking up linkedin profiles for recruiting, or looking you up on facebook when you apply for a job, than I am with the idea of someone recording an interview. The latter is in a limited context, where you expect to be examined anyway. The former is an intrusion on your private life to one degree or another.

I'm not saying, by the way, that it's an acceptable thing to do behind someone's back - that would be extremely scummy.

I just don't really see the problem with running something past a computer. Would it make a difference to you if there was a typist there and you ran the transcript past the computer? Is it just the emotional ick of it being your voice they have on record?

Edit: Is it the possibility of mass data collection? I can see that being creepy with things like car number-plates because there the difference in speed and ability enables things like continual tracking of individuals day to day lives. But I'm not sure how that would be a concern here.
I don't think this should be in the application. It's a monitor or OS issue. Couldn't we just use a color calibration matrix to map all colors to the spectrum the colorblind person does see?
Red means "stop," green means "go," is also learned behavior.
partly because she has no reason to find the diameter circumference or area of a circle except to answer the test questions?
I thought this was going to be about the ambiguity of some languages when being parsed. Go and Perl are a good example of such a languages. Pretty disappointed with the article even forgiving that. Importance is only a matter of perspective.
Because there is only one way for it to be "correct", eh?

Seriously, to each his own. My IDEs all support customizable syntax highlighting to use whatever I want. They all ship with some default settings, but I mod them every time to support what works for me.

That's the correct answer -- whatever works best for the individual is what is "correct".
Although I like the idea of comments in a stand-out color, red and green for deletion and insertion is absolutely necessary. It's intuitive and the standard, and using other colors (ugly tones of yellow and purple) is both ugly and confusing. If I showed the red/green screen to someone, they'd intuitively know what's being deleted and not. If I showed the purple/yellow screen to someone, they'd scratch their heads.

Also, the proposal that reviewers will determine whether or not to reject a patch based on how the colors look is preposterous. Imagine the Heartbleed patch being rejected because the colors look ugly. (This is, hilariously, the example the author uses.)
One of the points made by the article is that if syntax highlighters made comments jump out at people, they wouldn't be so eager to comment unnecessarily (like in your example) since it'd start looking bad. It's a solution that fixes two problems in one go.
In 2014, compliance with sql92 should be a minimum.
Having the comment bolded would be excellent! It would immediately highlight that the comment is both useless and incorrect, and should be removed. The only comments that should remain are those that you really don't want to miss.
The Oldest Rivalry in Software: Vi vs. Emacs
I'm sold on the argument in the article, I'd rather have the comment jump out and be deleted than see it sink into the background and remain.
Probably this science is in it's infancy, and as data grows and algorithms are refined, it will go places we can scarcely imagine at the moment.

I can hardly wait for the day when a baby is born and "garbageman" or "engineer" is stamped on it's head and it becomes futile to argue with empirical truth about "best fit".

Actually, kidding aside I think companies and employees may both benefit from this research if it is applied properly. But if a better form of these tools were available to our current system it would likely produce some very bad effects. I think maybe we have some important decisions about humans and their role in society coming up soon. Because technology never seems to go back in the bottle.
It is really that bad. I sent a new machine back - it was worthless for me [1].

For me it is not so much the touchpad changes (I do not use the touchpad) as the lack of physical trackpoint buttons. But even when I tried the new touchpad I absolutely hated the touchpad-is-a-button functionality. It does NOT feel good, sounds horible and is far from being ergonomic. For me personally it would be best to be able to buy Thinkpads just with trackpoint + buttons, but without touchpad.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7729110
Nowadays you can't realistically expect to browse the internet with Javascript disabled.
Do you map a 3D scene into 2D without any information about which aspect of the scene is important?
His argument would not apply to an actual standardization effort without the negative attributes explicitly called out in the article. (Non-standard, undocumented moving target, and a community of developers who go out of their way to antagonize competing projects.)
This one has some comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7726128 (businessweek.com)

Others:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724114 (makezine.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724164 (fda.gov)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7724861 (engadget.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727600 (theverge.com)
This will sound weird, but I actually turn off the syntax highlighter most of the time. I usually use a black background in my terminal, and often the syntax highlighter (or even directory colours in a shell) are set to dark blue, which I have a really hard time distinguishing.

I could remap my colours, I suppose, however I used to often find myself trouble shooting at someone else's terminal. Since then I just found it easier to have it turned off completely.
This is only part of the story - LMDB lacks a WAL because it uses shadow paging, which is a complementary technique with totally different characteristics more suited to read-optimized loads.

Similarly "not too fast for write-intensive apps" is only half the story - LMDB write transactions have a fixed cost related to the tree depth, so while many tiny updates may incur a noticeable fixed penalty in some cases, that cost becomes less noticeable e.g. with larger transactions performing reasonably localized updates (say, to partially sequential key ranges).

Also note even for huge databases, the write overhead of shadow paging is usually somewhere south of 64kb per transaction. To reiterate, the fixed cost is essentially per-transaction rather than per-update.
Be aware: You don't properly mourn the death of the first parent to die until the other one does as well.

My father died less than a year after my mother did, and it was far worse even though I was arguably closer to her.

I know this is not a particularly good time to be warning you about this but I wish somebody'd warned me and I probably won't get another reminder to do so. So, um, sorry, but I hope I'm right that it was worth saying.
As a sidenote, France happend to have exactly this teaching programs in elementary schools in the 80s. We had a language called "LOGO" running on thomson mo5. Instructions where "move the tortoise 20 front", then "rotate tortoise 90°", etc, and we would do pretty graphics on the screen and be happy.

Or at least that's how i remember it. A friend of mine who's now an history researcher told me recently how that thing disgusted him from computers for 20 years.
Create a map of LTE bandwidth using field test mode
I think that sometimes happens subconsciously. People internally don't want to the job and tank the interview.
I think the source of the problem with comments is that we try to make them serve two purposes:

1) Give the code clarity

2) Be the source of documentation

These goals aren't easily reconciled, too many comments reduce clarity whilst increasing the likelihood that they are inaccurate and not maintained.

Documentation generated from comments seldom explains how to use the APIs that a library or program exposes. Usually resulting in the addition of more comments, further reducing code clarity.

The real problem with comments is that too few of us write useful documentation.

I can't remember who said that the best thing a programmer can do is to learn to write.

Our job isn't just to write code, it's also to make sure the code is used... meaning we need to learn how to sell our code to people who will maintain and implement things against our interfaces. We need to sell to other devs, by documenting better and explaining how to use our code. Only then can we reduce the in-line comments that reduce readability of code.
To my own slight surprise, as I began reading the article, I realized: I know Mike. Didn't know he was into hunting scammers, though.

It's easier to find him than you think, if you know how to access ordinary public records. But if any scammers were to threaten Mike with retaliation, he'd probably say, "come at me, bro."

I have to say, in spite of having a lot of respect for Mike, his willingness to expose himself legally is, as we say in the industry, some serious cowboy bullshit.
Raccoons are often considered to be intelligent trash scavengers.
It seems to me that this could be very innovative in therm of security by possibly supplanting CSPRNG (Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators - many of which (or their implementations) were discovered insecure in the past) in some practical scenarios.
Twerking For GloZell Green
I think you're wrong, and you should go in therapy because I'm obviously right.
"Achieving more than 95 % accuracy when ranking a large number of student teams in an eight-months long business plan competition, based solely on the results of a simple online questionnaire taken at the beginning of the competition? This just seems too good to be true."

My first thought exactly.
> A friend of mine who's now an history researcher told me how that thing digusted him from computers for 20 years.

Can you please elaborate? Was it the infantilism? Or something else? Does your friend pursue coding now?

Logo and other "beginner" languages are more about introductions to using computers to create, not about teaching programming.
Before you jump to that conclusion, please take a look at the actual pictures of Liebeck's burns.

At least two people in this thread want me to stare at grisly pictures. Yes, they're awful. I sympathize with the lady for having to go through that pain.

That said, I can point you to grisly pictures of car accidents, gun accidents, and animal attacks all day. What does that have to do with understanding the nature of responsibility in our society and the impact of transferring responsibility for all accidents to the providers of products and services that are giving consumers exactly what they're asking for.

Good to-go coffee is served hot. That's what consumers want. That's what I want. What do you think that lady would have done all those years ago if McDonalds had served her some 115F coffee? My guess is that most people would take it back and ask for hot coffee.

As a matter of ethics, I espouse maximizing individual liberty and consumer choice. It's a bad thing to saddle everyone with lowest-common-denominator products and services because an extraordinarily small minority of people are unable to make decent decisions.
A few months ago, I met the founder of a company in the recruiting business. They aggregate online profiles of people, both applicants and other people happily employed at their current jobs. Then, based on the combination of their LinkedIn, StackOverflow, Facebook, FourSquare etc, their algorithm ranks folks according to the desired characteristics for a given position.

It sounds interesting in theory. That is, until I got to asking about how they quantified softer qualities that employers look for, like an applicant's social skills or potential for a client facing role. Apparently, to determine this, they look at the number of "check ins" people do at locations that are not their home city while employed. Their algorithm assumes that the person is traveling for business and is therefore trusted to meet customers.

There are so many assumptions in this one example that it makes me question the integrity of the whole system. An algorithm is only as good as the person designing it. Maybe Evolv really is better than these guys at finding quantitative markers for softer skills, but I remain skeptical.
I know those guys too! Although I find it tends to be an age thing. The middle aged asshole writes in all caps, the 20 year old asshole writes in all lowercase.
Using Chrome or Firefox on Windows XP also works. It's only Internet Explorer that's screwed up.
What about a modern browser on XP?
That would only be the case if everyone used the same algorithm with the same inputs.
I want a little moment stand still – English speaking a enormous advantage
Oh dear some one got out of bed the wrong side today :-)
Hypothesis: Social scientists who rely on government funding are more likely to support government spending than those who do not rely on government funding.
This comparison is a brush that is too wide. We do play games, such as board games, pokers, chess, some math related flash games. I'm saying _most_ games are too addictive(especially for kids) and are money-driving.
It seems like you guys (dang and .. I forgot the other one's name) added a feature to tag "meta" comments so they appear all the way down the bottom of a comment thread?

Because that's clever. I really like that solution, because "meta" comments usually do not deserve the downvotes they can get to move them away from the top part of the discussion.

I'm generally quite impressed by the new and improved job you are doing at moderating HN. I don't pay close enough attention to tell if it's improved the quality of discussion so far (it probably did, definitely did not get worse). I can say, however, the changes you made and especially the openness about most things, really improved the atmosphere and general feeling of "fairness" of this place. And that counts for a lot! Well done :)

BTW did that whole /pending experiment go anywhere? That page is always empty to me. I'm still not very sold on the idea, but just wondering.
Yup. Especially because on a fruit it's exactly the opposite.
I asked you to look at the pictures because you seemed unfamiliar with the details of the case - and when you're drawing an opinion about a legal case, details really matter.

The fact that you say that this is a matter of "an extraordinarily small minority of people [who] are unable to make decent decisions"[0] leads me to believe that you still don't understand the details of this specific case - including details pointed out elsewhere in this thread (let alone available elsewhere online).

We're not talking about some hypothetical woman with hypothetically hot coffee from a hypothetical company - we're talking about a specific incident in which the facts are actually very readily available.

[0] You also draw a completely false dichotomy when it comes to "individual liberty and customer choice", since that's actually not the issue that was litigated here. If you want to find out the issue that was actually litigated, I'd invite you to read up on the case to the point where you understand that the temperature of the coffee itself wasn't actually the reason that the jury awarded the punitive damages (the civil damages, yes, but not the punitive damages).