skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance.

I don't think they can be prevented with "SIGINT dominance" either.

But more importantly, to me: the idea of consitutional and human rights is that it was agreed, roughtly, that "these things are required to live a dignified, free life". Not literally, but I do think that is the rough idea. So taking away from that is akin to killing everybody. It's not even burning the village to save the village, it's burning the whole village to save a tiny part of it.

In a follow-upp comment you said "when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion" and I agree. For example, stop mass surveillance, stop selling weapons like candy, persecute war criminals (I mean the ones having a ball and getting invited to gala dinners on home soil, not the ones around the globe in areas of geostrategic interest), that sort of stuff. Otherwise, I'll stick with believing a lot of "security" stuff is just lip service, a way to transfer tax payer money into private pockets without achieving anything other than more control of the domestic population. I'm not talking about cogs in the machine, mind you, but the machine itself. I don't doubt many people in the NSA or elsewhere have good intentions, I just think that's worth very little in the bigger scheme of things.
$700k windfall: Russian man outwits bank with hand-written credit contract
Professionals come in various shapes. Torvalds is not the most polite man in the worlds, far from that. However, he achieved a lot, whether because or despite of it. So, yeah he reserve respect and deserve to be called professional. Although not to be called "the most polite man".
This is likely the first cloudant hosted app I've come across. Can you comment on your exeperience using it vs heroku or any of the other platforms?
Move to MSVC++ :P
Thanks! I've been programming iOS for about 5 years and Android for about 3, so the learning curve has primarily been with learning SpriteKit and general game concepts.

Getting used to a lot of custom drawing, animations, juicing, and trying to choreograph various scene transitions (and trying to time data processing and scene loading to work seamlessly).

One of the toughest things (that I'm still gradually improving on) is reducing glitches (drops in frame rate, for instance) during game play. Mainly an issue only on older devices (iPad 2, iPhone 4, 4S)

Definitely interested in making an Android version, but everything would need to be rewritten due to it being written in SpriteKit. A lot of resources can be reused though so it would take far less time.
Sure, I'd love to see Linus be more civilized in his criticisms. As it happens, nobody is perfect and I think Linus's imperfections are laughably trivial compared to many other people's.
> While I know people would be healthier and "better off" by eating healthy, I have no right to force people to eat a certain way.

You also have no right to go through their private communications unless you have a direct probable cause. (IANAL, the exact terms are probably different, but you get the idea)
Isn't that putting the cart before the horse a bit? You need to explain galaxy rotation, fine, but I could invent any arbitrary hypothesis to say why the galaxies are rotating too fast, then cite the rotation as evidence for the hypothesis. This doesn't strike me as very good science. I would want to capture some dark matter in a lab and examine its properties (or something equivalent) and then conclude that this might explain our astronomical observations.
I'm interested to see what effect having gameplay videos in the App Store come iOS 8 has. I suspect good pay-to-play games will see an overall boost.
I admit I was deliberately generalising, because so was the parent.

My culture might seem more aggressive and rude, but more often than not Northern/Central Europeans will tend to be less subtle than English speaking people. This can sometime come across as aggressive and perhaps even rude, even if no swear words are used.

As an example: Linus refers to the term 'Management by perkele', a Swedish term referring to Finnish management, that he himself uses. The word »perkele» is generally considered on par or worse than the English term 'fuck' (in the context of a swear word). Effectively, this term could be translated to 'Fucking Management', but whereas in Sweden this term is used rather publicly, it would hardly be conceivable to have such language in an English-speaking environment.

It's not that we are completely casual with swear words, it's just that they usually have a context, like you said; about something. Against someone is generally frowned upon. (Although, the latter reasoning usually have people objectify the person they are really swearing at.)
I'm assuming this is targeted at organizations wanting to run their own private cloud, not the typical small startup that consumes cloud resources from a player like Amazon, Google or Microsoft.
Some of us have worked for corporation where all problems were sugar coated in nicely sounding phrases. They got hidden so nobodies feelings are hurt and criticized person did not even recognized there is a problem with his work.

The whole system becomes dysfunctional in its own right.
And people still wonder why C++ is one of the most popular programming languages that ever existed...
Indian engineers design electric anti-rape bra
He's been living in the US since, what, 1996? He probably understands the cultural severity of the words he uses.
> "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."

So what's stopping the NSA from claiming they prevent alien invasions on a daily basis? After all, it's classified, so how would you know either way?
To be fair, that does seem like crazy shit. A bug free compiler is really essential, and it was really quite messed up.
When two galaxy clusters collide, the ordinary matter can get slowed down by non-gravitational interactions, leaving the dark matter to continue on inertia and gravity alone.

Closest references I could find: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-dark-galaxies-ways-collision-he...

"In the Bullet Cluster, a collision between two galaxy clusters appears to have caused a separation of dark matter and baryonic matter." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter
The most important battle you've probably never heard of
Correction: HN polls were never trustworthy because they are all voluntary-response polls.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2177163
I don't know. If there's any kind of software that can get emotional and hurt, it's a compiler.
Meh, yes. Shouldn't post replies like that at 40 degrees celsius outside ;). You are right.
I'm an ehealth / mhealth scientist / developer in The Netherlands. My biggest headaches come from infrastructure issues / security, so a product like Aptible would be great for me and my associates.

Seeing as I live in The Netherlands, and my end users (patients) will be Dutch, I'm bound by Dutch law. I'm no attorney, but I think it will be problematic to store electronic health records in the US.

Seeing as scientists / developers in The Netherlands are at the forefront of ehealth / mhealth development, are The Dutch somewhere on your list Chasb?

Different scenario: me and my Dutch associates would like to launch an ehealth / mhealth product in the US. In the eyes of US law, are we allowed to do this?
Clean code guidelines from Pluralsight courses
I think it's a case of "bugs happen". They fixed this one pretty quickly.
One thing I noted, (which I think is really awesome), is how you outline on the main Github page how to contribute and fix bugs. this kind of thing is really helpful in getting people to participate in open source.
Care In The Community
After moving money around, Google paid tiny amount in European taxes
Linus is just being Linus. I've been following him since Red Hat 5.2 and the open source culture has always been "colourful".

His words shouldn't be taken too personally, just as getting bitten by a grizzly bear shouldn't be taken personal.
I have to say that I've lost some respect for HN today. While there are many times I've missed the quality of the community from the early days of 2007, it's only been recently where I've wondered if the front page might be as censored as Digg was around the time I first discovered HN.
To understand Ellis' motivation, note:

"Q: You are a Christian, more specifically a Quaker. Does your faith have any effect on your scientific views, or vice versa?

Ellis: It may affect to some degree the topics I choose to tackle (...)"

He just wants to remain religious. Good that the interviewer didn't miss that question.

On another side, it's interesting that one of the books by the interviewer is: "Horgan, John and Reverend Frank Greer (2002). Where Was God on September 11? (A Scientist Asks a Ground Zero Pastor). San Francisco: Browntrout Publishers." Why "scientist" when the Wikipedia article on Horgan cites his education as "Columbia University School of Journalism (1983)" I don't know.
NASA site spells it the same. Presumably it's how physicists call ions.
LSD Related Death of an Elephant
That was the plan!

was going to use gpg to do most of the stuff (since I'm no cryptographer), and charge per gigabyte for the servers I host (just enough to cover costs).

the idea was hosting it yourself would be free, easy and of course, open source.
Does anyone know what's the email to ask questions?
Nigeria 'on red alert' over Ebola death in Lagos
Yep. Most of us understand them just fine. It's not really difficult to know what are the swear words in a foreign language, and what impact each of them has.

Plus, Linus is no "foreigner" in that sense. He has been speaking english for 30+ years, has had professional correspondence in english for 2+ decades, and has worked in several american companies. And he was located in the states for decades too, if I am not mistaken. And of course he is not some naive foreigner, he is hiqhly intelligent and technical, and can understand such things as the emotional etc impact of words very well (he has also explained hilself, several times).

The difference is, as the parent said, he is not prudish. He enjoys their use.
Good to hear I'm not crazy - mine is an MBA too, but an older model (mid 2011).
I have to say I found it disappointing to see Sama call out Hacker School and Google's explicitly discriminatory policies in a positive way. I'm all for helping people in need. As someone whose earnings were at less than half the poverty level just two short years ago, I can definitely empathize with people struggling at the margins, whether social or economic.

However, I believe making the decision solely based on a person's anatomy is wrong.

Context here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879598
Thanks for the comment - my network's SSID is already being broadcast though.
Erjang – Erlang on JVM
Here's an article about the orange box: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hands-...
It's not a matter of manners.

Breaking out the strong language is a clear way to separate the technicality from the opinion. People respond to taboo words differently than mundane ones.
I find interesting that the tone in the bug report is completely different (no "colourful language").
For the quickest workaround if you need only a lambda char, bind something like this to some keys:

(defun my-insert-lambda ()
(interactive)
(ucs-insert 955))

But there are many different options available in Emacs for inserting exotic characters, as listed here, for example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10192341/how-to-enter-gre... - I didn't have any need for them, as I only need lambda character when I'm programming in Racket (which understands this character natively, which is very nice!), but both abbrevs and input method ways of doing this look legit.
The alert has been caused by a patient flying to Nigeria - the theory is that it isn't easy to catch Ebola [1] so this is a test.

The disease has spread from Guinea to Liberia [2] so this would be a jump Eastward [3]

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/06/25/324941229/could-t...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_West_Africa_Ebola_outbreak...

[3] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/West+Africa/@14.6336215,...
>So you're speaking on behalf of the entire non-English speaking world?

Well, you spoke for the non-English speaking world too, and you don't even belong to it, unlike the parent. If anything, he was less paternalistic.

>But if you're more inclined to swear at someone, then it has nothing to do with prudishness and everything to do with aggression and rudeness. Is your culture more aggressive and rude than that of many English-speaking cultures? Some are....

You can be aggresive and rude without ever uttering a swear word. The only thing that makes swear words appear "worse" in this regard is some kind of prudishness.
>No, we understand them all right.

Understanding them is easy, because when used as swear words instead of during discussions about fucking or shitting, they don't mean anything. 'Motherfucker' just doesn't mean anything.

>We are just not generally as prudish as English-speakers. Perhaps it's more a culture difference than a language barrier.

There are a lot of native English speakers who swear a lot; they're generally[1] aware of the impression that they're making when they do it, though.

Maybe this is what you see as prudish: it's a somewhat unusual thing about English that we have taboo words that are taboo no matter what context (and weren't once untaboo words that started to be seen as euphemisms, therefore avoided), rather than just taboo things that you can say or taboo modes of speech when you're talking to a superior or an elder. The history of 'bloody'[2] should disabuse you of any notion that swearing in English has to do with prudery or sex.

Noticing that non-native speakers sometimes don't completely get the effect of English swearing generally comes from knowing non-native English speakers and knowing the impression that they're trying to make, and watching them misjudge the tone that swearing introduces and failing at what they're trying to do.

Like swearing while meeting someone's parents, or loudly within earshot of a lot of kids.

I'm sure Linus probably started his swearing thing by misjudging tone, even though at this point he realizes exactly what he's doing.

[1] I say 'generally', because there are differences between groups of English speakers as to which words are magical, and the frequency of use tolerated.

[2] This article starts with a super interesting discussion of 'bloody': http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/the_modern_history_of_sweari...
The Large Scale Structure of the Universe (1992)
I am not a user of erlang, but about everybody I've seen comments on how the real power of erlang is it's runtime.

If this is yours, and you actually get pretty far in it, you'll have some awesome experience that you can use elsewhere in the JVM-languages world :)
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145...

We could argue they're not the same thing but according to this definition it's a private cloud.
Studying music, learning law
Great work! This is really cool! My church currently doesn't have a system like this, but is definitely heading this way.
The "Secret" of Apple invented by Jobs, maybe had sense in the 80' 90' years. But Today it looks like ridiculous
They do not hold a monopoly on advertising. They hold the majority of the business, for now, but the structure of how and why they have that business is not monopolistic.

Source: Dearth of legal action from competitors or DOJ. And make no mistake -- their competitors are litigious as fuck.
7 coding tasks you should probably not write yourself
It's startupschool@ycombinator.com and I believe the deadline is 4pm local time.
This. Exactly. Google enjoys a natural monopoly (or in my view, a non-monopoly) in search because they continue to earn the most business there, not because they have eliminated viable alternatives.
Nepal Wireless Network
I think Nobel committee did Ralph Alpher deep disservice. He had not only conjectured the existence of CMB radiation but also computed properties the radiation would have. The Nobel instead went to two radio engineers who happened to chance upon CMB purely by accident.

George Gamow, his advisor, thought it would be funny to include Hans Bethe as a coauthor for Alpher's original research, just for the author list "Alpher, Bethe, Gamow". Bethe was not involved in anyway in that piece of research.

More here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Asher_Alpher#Big_Bang_nuc...

If you have not read Gamow's popular science writings.... highly recommended.
Ask HN: Apache cordova or what for mobile apps
I want to build an app to target android first, then as many other platforms as quick to do thereafter.

So what tooling should I download to get a mobile app running by sunday afternoon? The app should be pretty, talk to a backend service and run on my android and if possible an ipad?
It can be both observed and detected, it can be mapped even. The detection is a pretty indirect one right now though.

There's the usual stuff about galaxy rotation curves, there's the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster which people consider to be more of a smoking gun, but then there's also evidence from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_acoustic_oscillations visible in the CMB. That last one's slightly over my head, but apparently cosmologists find it extremely convincing, especially when combined with the other evidence. The wiki page talks about dark energy, but the subject has significance for dark matter too. Let me see if I can find the relevant plot...

At the end of the day it's just another weakly interacting particle. Last time we discovered one of those was the neutrino in the 50s, it's not an outlandish thing to think about.

EDIT: here's the BAO stuff: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept09/Einasto/Einasto6.h...
I learned to spell ions like that in highschool, though never more than Fe III, I think.
This is why we need anti-trust law. There are cases where throwing your capital around is appropriate, and there are cases where it is anti-competitive.
Did you read what I wrote at all?
There's now multiple Western airlines flying over Ukraine. Most planes simply avoid the Eastern parts of Ukraine.
Because one don't fuck with bug report!
You actually believe that agencies like GCHQ and NSA have "strong oversight" and are "heavily regulated"?

If you do, here's a little something to shaken that belief:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/09/edward-snowde...
Buzzfeed style headlines. Article includes this gem:

'The menagerie of dark matter candidates that might produce this kind of line include axions, sterile neutrinos, and "moduli dark matter" that may result from the curling up of extra dimensions in string theory.'

1) Assumption of dark matter
2) String theory

It's never hard to find a group of theoretical physicists willing to tag anything currently, poorly misunderstood as most likely an effect of dark matter and string theory.

And, of course, this will require a new observatory.
Are you trying to imply that's an unreasonable assumption?
Well, the thing is that "dark matter" doesn't necessarily have to all be super-exotic unknown particles. It's just that the behavior we see in the universe suggests that galaxies, clusters of galaxies, clusters of clusters, etc. contain more matter than we are able to detect, since if they contained only the matter visible to us their gravitational behavior would be different.

Of course, quite a bit of it might turn out to be exotic new types of particles, but that's a question for theory and experiment.

The precedent here is quite strong, incidentally, on a few counts.

We have high confidence in our understanding of gravity on the macro scale, and that understanding has survived some crises. For example, the orbit of the planet Uranus, as originally calculated, was "wrong" -- it did not appear to be conforming to the understood behavior of gravity. One theory which was developed to explain this, and which could at the time have been criticized in the style of your comment, was that there must be another planet further out, whose gravity was perturbing Uranus' orbit. Calculating backwards from Uranus' behavior, this theory predicted the location in the sky of the additional planet... which was then promptly observed via telescope (this was the discovery of Neptune).

Similarly, we have high confidence that weakly-interacting particles -- undiscovered variants of which are a popular candidate for examples of dark matter -- exist. The neutrino is the classic example: a particle which was posited by theory as "this is the only thing that makes sense given what we see", but which would necessarily be incredibly difficult to detect on account of barely if ever interacting with anything (and thus, again, would be open to your criticism). Of course, the neutrino was eventually detected and its existence confirmed.

So there is nothing wrong or arbitrary or unusual, in terms of the history of physics, in positing something like dark matter.
I believe they can be just as productive in a different capacity.

1. [Cynically] the unemployed are productive, as a discipline/threat to the employed -- "do as we tell you or you will end up unemployed" [with long list of implicit penalties].

2. The whole idea that humans must work to live is a weird cognitive bias in western political discourse. If you look at actual employment rates they max out around 40% -- children and pensioners don't have paid employment, homemakers aren't paid for their labour, many folks are only partially employed. Yet our whole dialog around how to structure society is based on the axiomatic supposition that full employment is some sort of religious directive.

Wouldn't we be better off looking for more culturally nuanced ways to measure human value than mere fiscal utility over time?
I regard my primary task as understanding code so I can write as little code as possible. I still write a lot of code, but I expect my editing environment to surface semantic information for me. Otherwise, I do it all myself. Why would I want to do that?

I've used Vim for a few years. I enjoy editing in it for sure. But it does feel like it optimizes the wrong thing. By the time it's time to write code, I'm more invested in the ideas than the mechanical action of implementing them. I also feel like core Vim is very good, but the experience suffers greatly once you enter Weird Plugin Land, where you need to set SpecialOption if using RandomPlugin version 0.88. I get why it happens; it's also a waste of time.

I don't have the patience for that. I dread maintaining my vimconfig for this reason.
I don't think that any of his accomplishments justify the kind of privilege he is exercising here.
How badly does gentrification break this system? After all, any cred you have as a trust fund hipster is lost if your home looks like it's in a "safe" part of town ;)
Surely betting on yourself to win is fine?
They left out .zoo (LZW) and .lzh/.lha (LZSS).

Both were quite widespread in the BBS era.
As impressive as the video bitrates are, only the lowest option is watchable with just Google Fiber :/
Why You Must Leave Religion Behind
I believe the way Mormonism differentiates itself from other forms of Christianity is the additional text (Book of Mormon) and the addition of Joeseph Smith as a prophet.
>Torvalds doesn't want a "code of conduct," saying that "venting of frustrations and anger is actually necessary, and trying to come up with some ‘code of conduct’ that says that people should be ‘respectful’ and ‘polite’ is just so much crap and bullshit.”

This is interesting when one compares it with other projects such as Django which have gone the whole other way in addressing modern views of how to approach diversity, gender issues, conduct etc.