skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's hard enough to get even Congress as a whole to care about issues normal people actually care about, but it's even worse if even Congress itself can't pass good laws because it's being hijacked by a few. For example, most of the House voted to pass the USA Freedom Act as is (which was pretty good originally), but the Rules Committee, comprised of a handful of people, stripped down almost all the good reforms in it, making it essentially useless, and potentially worse than if it had not existed:

http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/05/23/four-reasons-usa-freedu...

Sometimes, it all falls onto one man, such as the Audit the Fed bill, which also got a huge majority in House, but Harry Reid refused to put it on the floor in Senate, or when Patrick Leahy single-handedly killed the recent patent reform bill.

All of this doesn't seem "democratic" at all to me.
This is very useful. I hope Amazon doesn't try to C&D it.
"If the destruction of all this unique user-generated content pisses you off -- and it should"

I'm not sure why it should. When did we get this strange idea that when you make some piece of content, no matter if it's quality or not, it deserves to pollute the cyberspace forever.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion, but one of the reasons nature "works" is that everything old is allowed to dissolve and become the base ground for the new that will come after it.

People naturally copy content that they find interesting. And content which isn't that interesting naturally gets lost. Maybe that lost content stuck around enough to inspire someone to do something in that spirit later or (which also counts), but it doesn't survive itself.

Imagine if everyone gets Glasses one day and starts doing non-stop 1080p video stream of their lives. Are we going to be "pissed off" at that being deleted too?

If you do the stats you'll notice that over 99.99% of the content in archive.org is never accessed. Nobody cares.

And that's how it should be. We should really allow content to die. I have the firm belief that information doesn't just "want" to be free. It also wants to be allowed to die gracefully at some point.
Emacs.

c-w will kill the active region.
The law isnt easy. It would require a lot of pi and legal work to research these individuals to determine what information about them is "irrelevent" in the eyes of eu law.
Soyuz has been using the short ascent only in the past few years. The Progress shuttle has been doing it longer.

When Hadfield went up, they were still using the older long procedure.
It appears they're recruiting in July for Fall 2014; I'd be interested in participating. Would you suggest it?
I bet it would be unnerving for someone like Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen to play this program, where it would have 1 minute on the clock and they could have the whole day. It would make many of the moves in under a second and they'd be better than the grandmasters' moves!
The different modes (actually 3 in vi, and 6 in vim) recognise that you need different functionality when doing different things. If you are just writing, you don't need to have edit functionality, if you are reading you need advanced movement, and you don't need all of this other stuff when you are entering a complex command.

It is a completely different way of working, but when you realise that you spend most of your time coding not writing, you can see that spending a lot of time in normal mode, with your keys now doing useful stuff, can save a lot of keypresses.

Of course, I'm not saying that vi is perfect, and if emacs works for you, then there's really no reason to switch, unless you want to try it out for funs.
Actually, I almost feel, that in the czecho(-slovak) tradition, it almost is that way. There is a pattern, where often you have at least two universities, and one of them would be branded "technical".

I.e. Charls University and Czech Technical University in Prague, Masaryk University and Technical University in Brno, Kommenius University and Slovak Technical University in Bratislava, and I think I'd probably find more examples.

Usually, the technical ones brand themselves as being more "practical". For example, I studied CompSci at regular uni, my friend at technical and while we had a mandatory two semster algebra course and mandatory two semester discrete math course, they had these two combined in one course, first semester only. But it was more of a rule of a thumb, I know that their math-analysis course was as rigorous as ours. They still had better partnerships with local businesses.

I have to admit, that I was reasonably fond of all the theoretical stuff (although not very good at it :) The two semesters of group-theory certainly made my decision to do my masters in kryptology and information security much easier :P
This.

I would use cloud backups extensively...but when it'll take 6 months to actually upload all the data I'd want to, then that goes out the window.

If I had gigabit ethernet, the keeping files local practically no longer makes sense - my internet is faster then my disk storage. I can work almost entirely with cloud-based files and only keep a small amount of locally cached things.

What's worse is people are also just completely ignorant about how new technologies work. In the recent NBN debate in Australia, there was no end of "the future is wireless! Femto-cells on every power pole!"

With absolutely no consideration (or willingess to acknowledge) that any idea like that would absolutely require gigabit fiber backhaul (of much higher capacity then the wi-fi bandwidth if you want to use wavefront shaping techniques).
I've been eating a very high fat, very low carb diet now for almost 2 years. In that time I've shed 20 pounds (and I was never fat) and my cholesterol numbers have improved significantly. My experience is by no means scientific evidence, but just thought I'd share. Reading "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living" by Drs Phinney and Volek was life-changing.
It wouldn't surprise me if the top players regularly played against the best algorithms as part of their training.
How Chinese people see their country's biggest tech CEOs
Because drugs are illegal it is hard to do research but most peoe are pretty clear that drugs can have a causal effect on mental health problems, even for people who would not have exhibted and mental illness without drug use.

I am strongly in favour of legalising drugs. Warning people about the risks of mental health problems is a calm, sensible, evidence based bit of advice and is not anti-drug propaganda.

It is disappointing to see so many advocates for better drug laws ignore or even argue against this advice. They are harming the campaign for better drug laws and they are ignoring the risks that people face.
Where in Central Europe are you? I lived in Vienna and now living In Berlin, and while it was a bit of a struggle being vegetarian in the former it think over here there are actually quite a lot of good options (obviously not anywhere near as good as some other places like San Francisco).
> you need different functionality when doing different things.

I don't buy that. When I'm using an editor writing, moving and reading is totally mixed.
The companies advertising in places like this are usually not exactly the ones with a legit business address and a great track record of being transparent.

The money made from ads is probably a lot less than the ad revenue you know from other places, there are a lot of middlemen, ad networks, and money services involved and everyones takes their cut.
The Post Office Should Just Become a Bank
Any discussion of how projects like monotone defeat this?
Vi was designed to work over a 300 baud modem. The throughput needed for a text editor is minimal (and still is). A C API would avoid the extra overhead, but no one is interested in writing cross platform unicode/binary safe plugins in the language. Also consider that buggy plugins that live in other processes won't crash the editor.
I wonder what impact this will have on the development of https://heml.is/ …
People sometimes make copies of things they find interesting, but those copies are rarely accessible to the public. It can be pretty hard to get your hands on something after it disappears from the web. For example, forums.truecrypt.org went down three days ago, it's of interest to some people, and you're going to have a hell of a time finding some guy who happened to launch HTTrack on it before it went down.
> Is this really the top comment on this thread? And I thought HN had come so far.

I don't understand what that means. The back button issue is a serious glitch, hence the upvotes.
> This is definitely true

It is a strong argument and I know to many examples where this is just simply not the case.

I myself have been eating all my life big portions of food couple times a day, mainly with meat and potatoes, sometimes with some salad though a lot of times without any. I'm not a big fan of sweets, but I do eat bread and some other stuff containing carbs, simply because it is almost impossible to avoid it these days.

At the same time I'm developer spending most of my time in front of computer and I do not go to gym. It has been like this for the last decade, though in the last 5 years I have spent much more time in front of computer and much less doing anything else. Yet my eating habits hasn't changed, neither did my weight. Since I was 16 and my wight was always 90-95 kg, I'm >1.9m height. I believe that this case just proves that calories in vs calories out doesn't always apply. Otherwise by now I should be obese whereas nothing even remotely close has happened.
Very neat idea. I added your site to my bookmarks.

But you need a new logo--something that looks more solid, polished, and professional.
I've bought over 100 books in the last 6 months. Maybe more. I wouldn't step foot into any of the bookshops proposed here.

70% of so of my books are from a local thrift shop. We go every week and buy a stack of books at a time. There's stuff here that you don't find anywhere because it's coming from people cleaning out bookshelves that are decades old.

I think the Internet has made the printed book even _more_ important, largely because so many people are ignoring it. Information is only valuable if it's asymmetrical: the ease and abundance of online information makes you feel informed, but usually just results in me-too thinking.

Jonathan Franzen notes in an essay that people used to wait for the next great novel like we wait for summer movies. I believe he goes on to lament the fact. I think this change is for the better; the book has transmuted into a source of arcane information that's of real consequence in business, writing, or, best of all, just living.

With that in mind, the bookshop shouldn't emphasize what's popular, "curated", or recommended. Give me things no one else is reading. I want Zafon's Cemetery of Forgotten Books, not "Yo! Sushi".

A few specific responses to the article:

Recommendations: Amazon's recommendation engine never gives me good suggestions. I think it's because once you've read something you like your thinking evolves and you want something _different_, not something similar. For that reason, I would be really skeptical of the digital suggestion features these proposals tout.

Social: reading is anti-social. Period. It should enrich your ideas and conversation without people noticing. Nobody is impressed that you're carrying around _Infinite Jest_.

e-books: the materiality of a book is crucial. I can often remember spatially where something is in a book. Underlining physically helps attach ideas. When you flip through the book, the lines don't flow to different pages each time you read (very annoying when trying to dig up quotes later). You're not going to read that many books in your life, the expense of physical books isn't really a good excuse.

This is probably all really terrible business advice for booksellers.
As soon as they have the budget, they'll be watching you ;) For the meantime, dozens of foreign intelligence services are probably picking up the slack.
If you want to be on a low carb diet as a vegetarian you have to accept eating processed food, and a lot of it.

Specifically: Soy Protein Isolate, TVP (Textured Vegetable Protein - it does have carb so don't overdo it), and Seitan (Wheat Gluten), if you are not a vegan then add eggs to that - perhaps as egg whites (i.e. more processed food).

Nuts are reasonable too. Then add in a bunch of low carb vegetables (i.e. no root vegetables), and avoid fruits for the most part.

A sample breakfast: TVP soaked in egg white with some nutritional yeast for flavor, fried as an omelet.

Snack: A cup of protein shake with as little sweetener as you can manage to handle. (You would have to buy pure soy protein isolate powder and add the sweetener yourself - most places put in a ton.)

Lunch: Seitan - fried or baked, and salad (watch the dressing - most have sugar, make your own).

Dinner: Vegetable stir fry such as zucchini, mushroom, and onion plus oil for satiation.

It's easier to be a meat eater, but if you are not a picky eater it can be done.

PS. Tofu is not 1:1, it's closer to 4:1 so it can probably be used. TVP is about 2:1.
(shaking my head)
Keto is not meant for long-term use. You will have one miserable life if you could pull that off but i doubt you could even if u tried. It works really well for cutting that last bit of stubborn fat when u trying to show your six pack.
> If I make copies of your personal data (credit card info, address, name, SSN) and pass it around the Internet, is it a victim-less crime? I'm merely making copies of bits onto a webpage (the other effects shouldn't matter..according to your logic).

There is a big difference between personally identifying information and copyrighted works. Same goes for passwords or password hashes and so on. Yes, I believe there are specific kinds of data people should be allowed to keep private, and secret. That is why I don't broadcast my credit card info, address, name, SSN or passwords on Hacker News (even though I've told enough about my life so that a very competent hacker could no doubt figure me out!). I also don't put the said information on a CD and sell it to the public.

> The real victims are the people put out of work due to rampant piracy

I do not believe this is actually happening. Piracy might be happening but the reason that such people would be put out of work (if they ever are) is that people don't want to pay (or donate or whatever). Piracy isn't the reason, piracy is the symptom.
My favorite resource on micronutrients and diet are the graphs in this article http://www.vegsource.com/harris/ten_categories.htm
Have computers and software progressed that much since the Deep Blue days? I didn't realize that chess has pretty much been solved now. Are computers really that much better than people nowadays?
It's actually not that common. Players will use chess engines to analyze positions, but they will rarely play against them because it doesn't provide realistic practice for an actual chess match.

For example, it may be reasonable to play an aggressive variation against an opponent because you think they might have difficulty finding a response in time pressure, but a computer can make precise calculations in any situation, and so such a strategy almost always backfires.

What's more, chess is often abstracted at higher levels in terms of things like long term plans ("I want to put pressure on the c7 pawn and control c6") instead of concrete material gains, which allows players to make progress even in positions where there are no direct threats and no sensible exchanges of pieces. Computers when faced with such situations will know that the position is objectively drawn and so will just shuffle their pieces around aimlessly, and playing against this kind of thing is not very good practice for actual human opponents who will try to find ways to beat you anyway.
Which ones aren't fingerprinted and photographed?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-VISIT

> The U.S. government states that the purpose of US-VISIT is to advance the security of both the United States and worldwide travel, through the use and sharing of biometric information for identity management. U.S. Department of State consular officers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers collect biometric information (digital fingerprints and a photograph) from all non-U.S. citizens between the ages of 14 and 79, with some exceptions, when they apply for visas or arrive at major U.S. ports of entry.[4]

There are "some exceptions", and it doesn't cover people under 14 or over 79.
While the elegant design of Emacs appeals to me, I found vim more enjoyable to get into. I'm not a strong vim user at all, and I use it mainly via ViEmu inside Visual Studio.

Having really powerful text-editing commands is just fantastic. I don't need an extensible shell that can work as a browser or email client. I need great text editing added to my IDE.

Also, a plug for the fantastic VIM Adventures, which can ease the process of becoming proficient inside vim: http://vim-adventures.com/
I'm interested in the reaction of the US public. Will they suddenly start to be concerned about total surveillance?

Reading German tech forums, I get the impression Germans are just as concerned about German surveillance as they are about US surveillance. It's very unpopular and seen as a waste of tax money. Biased sample, though.
If it were a warrant canary. Doesn't stating that the update is obviously a canary put the true crypt team possibly in legal trouble? Communicating the warrant. Even cryptically is still communicating about the warrant.
Only realistic if they were preparing for some sort of Man vs Computer tournament.

Computers don't play like humans, and they are consistent in their weaknesses as well as their strengths. As players are more exposed to playing against various chess programs, they learn what positions computers are not so good at (long-range strategical themes, beyond the typical move horizon). A local optimisation, of sorts.

So players start adopting an anti-computer style of play, which requires a different mind set to pull off. That in turn affects their natural style of play.

So I argue the opposite, for preparing for top-flight tournaments, players probably avoid / severely limit playing against chess engines, to avoid this natural anti-computer bias to their play.

Sure, the engines are good for checking variations and analysis, as an assistant. But not as a leader, nor as an opponent.
If you think Emacs is heard to grasp, try out TECO [0], very popular on DEC-PDP's.

[0] http://almy.us/teco.html
Harvard is trying as hard as it can to not be an elitist club.

They really are trying to be the best university in the world.

Which is it?
I've been 1.8m and 64kg since I stopped growing. I know I overeat most of the time. Where does the additional energy go? Why is it stored as fat in some people, not in others. There is more to health than simple calories in = calories out.
As a rider, the trolleys are my least favorite vehicles. In theory, electric is great, lots of torque, whatever. In practice, they're the slowest vehicles in MUNI's diverse fleet. Go too fast, and the trolley pole comes off the wire, and the driver has to walk back and reconnect it. Get stuck behind a slow driver, and you have a whole pile of buses moving glacially. My least favorite time was when I had to use either the 14 or the 49, depending on the destination, because they share a lot of the same route.

The diesels work just fine on first or second gear, and the steepest hills with buses are diesel. I find especially amusing how the 29 scrapes the ground when it moves on and off from Excelsior Heights. The very steepest hills with public transportation have cable cars, obviously.
"They don't make it exactly easy, do they?"

The steps seem clear to me. I can't think of another way they could do this. They're asking for all the information needed to make an initial assesment. The onus is on the submitter to make the claim and provide the evidence.

I can imagine in most cases, Google will require follow-up documents or further evdence to prove that you are no longer associated with event X, Y or Z. All of this will make the process even lengthier.

What I'd like to know is if this ruling applies only to Google or to other search engines too? The action was bought againt Google, but the European Court of Justice uses the generic wording "operator of a search engine" in it's press relase about the ruling. Presumably this means any local or international search engine that operates with offices in that country must also provide a link removal assesment service. Does the search engine have to remove results from their entire index or just the results served to users of a particular country (where the claim was filed)? And are search engines under any obligation to publish the results of successful requests to remove links?

This ruling feels unworkable and throws up so many complications.
You can watch Magnus Carlsen play a chess program on his phone here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNvVWeHZG00

As you can tell from his commentary, he thinks the machine is rather stupid (and he is winning after the opening) but the machine is a much better calculator than he is and when the situation becomes more concrete he has to force a draw.

Of course, the computer on his phone is considerably worse than the best chess engines, but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy.
You look at the various other agencies and foundations that feed into NSA, and look at the academic work being funded by those groups.

There's a reason Springer-Verlag publishes so many data-mining books.
> but top chess players generally consider computers to be excellent calculators but dumb in terms of general strategy.

Is computer assisted chess a thing? Perhaps with standardized hardware, but any software.

In chess I'm good at strategy but terrible at calculating and I miss obvious stuff all the time in my fight for strategy. I always thought I'd do great with computer assistance to look for the obvious stuff, and me telling the computer the long term strategy.
About $1m. Enough to buy a house and take care of emergencies/unemployment/travel. I would drive me insane not to be able to program, but it's nice to be picky about what programming you actually do.
it applies to every search engine. I read somewhere earlier that Yahoo has confirmed they are working on a solution, but Microsoft has not. Which is funny because Yahoo uses Bing for its search results.
> Sometimes, it all falls onto one man

I suppose you're looking for this type of system [0]. Switzerland is a proud and well-known defender of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
This bit about summed it up for me:

"You can say that [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:resultsData options:0 error:nil]; is more verbose than r.json() but verbosity is an Objective-C convention, for the better or the wors[e]"

For this sort of task, like one of the other commenters, I would almost certainly write something quick and simple (and fairly unstructured) in bash; if it needed to be more maintainable, I'd write it in Ruby. Using a verbose, static typed language just seems wrong here.

Of course, for any given programmer and any given task, using the language with which they are most familiar is often a very good option (obviously only in circumstances where it is possible to perform the task in that language and its specific attributes don't jeopardise the successful running of the task).
On a macro level, I agree. But switching mode isn't so hard that you have to sit twenty minutes in normal mode, thinking what you would do in the entire document, before you switch to writing it.
The results page consistently use "availible" instead of "available" which was a little jarring.