skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this like saying most hospital patients should take responsibility for their own society's health-care system?

It's beyond the scope of the average person to research alternatives, define alternatives, promote said alternatives and push them as hard, or harder, than the big players in any field.

Saying that "users are the ones that have made Facebook and Google powerful and monolithic walled gardens" is ignoring the fact that those "in the know" have been arguing against these practices since their inception, and that competing against these corporations would take a huge marketing campaign in order to even get the word out that alternatives exist.

For example: Many people are happy with Pandora, Spotify, Rdio etc for their music listening. They aren't aware that they don't actually own the tracks in their playlists until they try to play them on something else, or burn them to CD etc. This is an example of a paradigm shifting, with only half of the parties being aware of the shift. This is happening all the time, in all sorts of areas. The average (non IT industry) person has neither the time, nor inclination to keep up with these changes, they just want to listen to their music, look at their photos, read their email etc.

Yes, caveat emptor is still a legitimate rule, but the number of caveats per emptor is getting ridiculous, and no-one in power seems to think this a bad thing. It seems that it's expected to assume that every provider (of goods or services) is megalomaniacally sociopathic, and if you get burnt by such behaviour, it's your own fault.
Jupiter and Venus Will Meet Up in the Morning Sky Monday
You can represent two-state systems (qubits) with quaternions.

In general, quantum mechanics is about using complex vectors and unitary operations on them. As it is enough to implement quaternions, they are silently used in quantum mechanics.
This I agree with strongly.

It's hard for kids to love school; schools are prison. The only cases of people liking school I know were: a/ the bullies, b/ people in schools that are not run like prisons (my high school was that), c/ kids who developed Stockholm syndrome towards the school.

I suspect that c/ is actually an important goal of schooling - because such people make great employees later.
For those curious about the realtime layer in Phoenix, I have a screencast where we live code a Phoenix chat app. We've added a View layer since the recording, so ignore the rendering hack:

http://chrismccord.com/blog/2014/05/06/how-to-build-an-elixi...
If you read it, yes, it is a generalization.
>> "Socialism" is now very different from Stalin's view of it

Didn't released documents after 1989 show that most of the West European communist parties took orders directly from Moscow/Stalin?

IIRC, it was a big shock that the reason the Italian communist party was so reasonable after WW II was because it was orders from Moscow. (Stalin wanted to split Europe in two.)

I remember that the Swedish communist party used to be staunch Stalinists until Moscow told them he was wrong. Is that where the different view of Socialism came from? :-)

(The Swedish communists (SKP/VPK/V) claim to have stopped taking orders in the 1960s and have been critics of Soviet since 1989.)
Would be nice to just add a toggle for the annotations? I rarely use genius for the various annotations, but with the wealth of song (rap) lyrics, I often end up on the site. Being able to switch off annotations would be great.

[edit: Come to think of it, I'd love to see three modes: the current highlight, none, and footnotes (which one might hoover/click). Whenever I read annotated texts, I rarely care about all annotations -- I only look up the things I need to look up. And the highlights are really annoying when reading a text.]
I wasn't implying anything beyond the quoted phrase. My last remark was targeted at anyone reading the comment, I didn't mean to sound condescending towards you.

I don't share your belief that early libraries and frameworks have the potential to override Elixir's broad domain. In other words, even if there will be a widely popular library/framework for Elixir, it won't automatically negate its other strength or fitness for a wide range of uses.

During the recently held ElixirConf we've seen it used in a telecom company, also powering game servers, distributed robots, and hobby projects like an elevator controller and command-line applications. The community already has a diverse set of interests and many of us will be pushing the adoption in our respective areas of interest.

In any case, our best effort today would be to continue hacking and having fun with Elixir, and at the next year's conference we'll be able to see in which direction the trends go.
I really appreciate your attitude. You are really inspirig people like me to understand it is okay to make mistakes :). Also, every mistake teaches you something. Learn from your mistakes and keep building things that matters :).

Needless to say, I am becoming a fan of yours :)
One of the final paragraphs really resonates with my own experiences of international (mostly EU) meetings:

""" During recent travels to Spain, I had the opportunity to observe participants in a pan-European seminar on youth and globalisation. While English was the default language of this group, in conversations between any two people the participants would often switch to the native language of one or the other. For example, a young man from France would greet another in English, but upon discovering that his conversation partner is from Italy, would switch to Italian. This would not find approval among Esperantists. Ironically, English proves the neutral choice here. It is often seen as a sure bet for international communication among young people in many countries, but it is well understood that other languages may serve just as well. In the Esperanto movement, on the other hand, there is an ideological attachment to Esperanto which mandates its use even if there are other, more culturally rich possibilities. """

My experience was at large international demo-parties. I mainly noticed this for English and German, but that's because I speak those two languages relatively fluently (Dutch is my mother tongue). The same must have been happening around me for French or Spanish (or who knows what else) as well, but I don't speak those languages well enough to tell for sure whether they were using (say) Spanish as a common bridging language or were native speakers.

And yes, English is usually the sure bet. Although some of the comments elsewhere ITT have piqued my interest to perhaps learn some Spanish in the future, especially if it's really that easy to learn. Funny, I used to hate learning language (French and German) in high school. It's only later in my life that I found out I actually have quite a knack for it :) (I should probably blame the way it was taught, but I can't really get that much worked up about it, I'm pretty satisfied with the quality of my education overall)
Well, teddyh might have a point here, nonetheless: By now, I understand that ftfy is about fixing mixed up encodings between UTF8, latin-1, CP437, CP125[12] and MacRoman (only). But by claiming you are fixing "Unicode" in general as the first thing on the GitHub page, you might be misleading first-time visitors. Maybe you should try to place the "warning" about the encodings your library does handle right at the start somewhere? And make it clear that "moji-un-baking" is the library's central and main use-case, not just an "interesting thing" it can do. Despite being quite aware of Unicode and string encoding, I had exactly the same thoughts as teddyh as I read the first few paragraphs ("Oh, now we will see those encoding illiterates converting all those beautiful bytes in some highly informative character encoding to all-too-boring-ASCII.")

Which leads me to my other concern: Why do you use NFKC compatibility as the default normalization? Given you are a text mining company, you of all guys should know you loose valuable information - particularly about numbers, super- and subscript characters - with this normalization strategy. Doing NFKC on stuff like all kinds of articles, books, patents, etc. would lead to potentially disastrous results (e.g., NFKC "decomposes" the string 'O\u2082\u00B9' to 'O21' instead of 'O_2^1' - "oxygen, reference 1"). In general, I think NFC is what Python and many other libraries do, while I believe NFKC should only be used when you know what you are doing (and why you need it). Maybe it is useful for some strange, geeky tweets, but I would argue that its the corner case, not the default.
Police can stop you for a visa check.
Why Windows Phone isn't selling well
Completely agree --the fundamental problem to solve is that of motivation, and motivation will very often come from role models and mentors.

The function of a mentor is not limited to providing an example of what can be learned and why it should be learned. A mentor should also directly provide motivation reenforcement whenever the kid shows progress on the right path.

The best education will be self-direction in a culturally rich environment that rewards and celebrates learning and educative achievements.
Can't upvote this enough.

I owe my programming career and my English language knowledge solely to video games. I learned English because I really wanted to know what my hero and NPCs were talking about in Fallout. I learned programming because I wanted to make a StarCraft clone.

I remember taking the end exam in secondary school; there was an assignment there that basically amounted to summing up hypotenuses of right triangles, deriving them from known triangle legs beforehand. When we all left the exam room, kids were cheering, "this task was simple, you had to use Pythagorean theorem!". I was cheering, "this task was simple, you had to sum up lengths of 2D vectors! By the way, wtf is that Pyythagorean thing?".

I learned a lot of maths quickly by 15 thanks to game development - things like vectors, matrices, trigonometry. I didn't always have the right terminology (but that I acquired later on the way), but I understood what they are, how they worked, and I had a purpose for learning them.
Show HN: Tappr, a parody of what mobile gaming has become
No, algorithms people don't do lossy compression (Human/Computer Interaction people tend to do those). However you can do algorithms that fail with a certain probability, then you just repeat it until it succeeds and calculate the expected cost. Specially within information theory, there are a lot of strange techniques dependent on things like this.
What do you think of a community-based radiation level mapping app?
> I learned all the sine / cosine stuff around age 10, as I was trying to write a computer game and needed to move things around circles (...) I wanted to learn it, so I did. I can still remember everything I need to know about those because it was interesting to me at the time.

Just like me. I learned it around 13, because I wanted to figure out how to rotate sprites and move them around other sprites; I remember spending long hours looking at a math book and drawing pictures with a pencil. When I finally grokked the proper transformations, I was extremely excited, and I remembered that math forever since. Pretty much every other thing I learned for game development I understand well and remember 'till now.
Not exactly, it's closer to "escaping" or "eluding" in modern Greek, but it comes from dia (through) + fygi (flight), so maybe it meant "slips through the cracks" in ancient Greek. I think it meant "escape" back then too, though.
I find the whole "Regulators are bad!" attitude/narrative tiresome. Regulators are responsible for protecting the interests of the public. They might sometimes be slow to adapt to advances in technology and changes in the market, but I'd rather they erred on the side of caution.

If financial regulators had been a bit less accommodating towards "innovative" products and business models, we might all be a bit better off.
Advice to my fellow developers  Certainities and Serendipities
I don't think that was the concern. Probably something less sinister, like delaying his mail or disallowing exercise time etc.
Was it ever included with Windows?

(I think most other posters think you're referring to the Hover! I linked, which, like Pinball in the OP, was included with Windows.)
Surprising salaries for jobs you’d never imagine
The probabilities discussed in this paper seem to have an L1 flavour (Manhattan distance) while those in quantum mechanics come from L2 functions (Pythagorean distance).
I still wonder if the more a country is in a financial depression, the more it's vulnerable to extremism, and how do you measure it, and do you avoid it.

I wonder how much anyone care about not going in to war, deep in one's heart, to not let crazy type be in control, especially nowadays politicians.

I believe democracy and moderate, boring, slobbish politics are still the key in having a peaceful civilization. If the CIA is conspiring to assassinate potential war-mongerers, I would feel fine about it. Conspiracists have a point that peaceful and consented exploitation is a sad situation to be in, but it's far better than the many past horrors of conflict.

The more WW2 gets old, the more people don't realize what war really is. Short conflicts in the middle east or vietnam are not the same than when a conflict comes at your doorstep.
> It sounds good, feels good, etc. but once you actually see it with your own eyes it makes sense why this hasn't caught on.

I doubt that. To me a more plausible and equally good explanation is that schools are primarily places where parents can drop their kids off for half of the day to be able to go to work. Homeschooling requires someone to stay at home and do the schooling, which is becoming less and less affordable for most of the people.
You can't have a negative net worth unless you have credit so in many ways those with negative net worth are not the poorest and will often tend to have available cash/credit and an income. Many may be graduates with good jobs and prospects but who have not paid off their loans.
The German philosopher, Hegel had quite the man-crush on Bonaparte.

"I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it."

Similarly, Hitler saw himself as being the concrete expression of the soul of the German people. He may not have been aware of the quote, but the ideas it expressed were strong themes in the German romantic movement.
> One of the most fervent supporters of the Davy Crockett was West Germany's defense minister Franz Josef Strauss, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Strauss promoted the idea of equipping German brigades with the weapon to be supplied by the US, arguing that this would allow German troops to become a much more effective factor in NATO's defense of Germany against a potential Soviet invasion. He argued that a single Davy Crocket could replace 40–50 salvos of a whole divisional artillery park — allowing the funds and troops normally needed for this artillery to be invested into further troops, or not having to be spent at all. US NATO commanders strongly opposed Strauss's ideas, as they would have made the use of tactical nuclear weapons almost mandatory in case of war, further reducing the ability of NATO to defend itself without resorting to atomic weapons.[7]

It seems that even at that time, the US wanted to keep the conflict nuclear-free as much as possible.
I don't know. ADHD looks to me like a normal consequence of putting a small kid in a jail and telling to listen to boring stuff for half a day without moving or talking, or else. Think of how you'd behave in such situation as an adult.
DIY – Business Owner's Guide to Creating an Effective Website
I second that: Sweden is no Norway and Scandinavian is not universal.
My religious beliefs are . . . in flux, but my wife is a very committed Christian and I've started going to church with her. I have to say its pretty great. A couple of folks volunteer to watch the kids while everyone else listens to a nice service and has lunch. I think from the point of view of children it has some larger socialization benefits. Not just because there is a larger community of people keeping an eye on them, but because it can offer an alternative and potentially friendlier venue for socialization than the somewhat Darwinian environment of school.
16bit game with awesome artwork and music
What a surprisingly content-free article from MIT.

What bound did they break? By how much? In what domain does the bound apply?

(There is no one "compression bound" for lossless compression; there exist infinitely many lossless compression schemes which can compress at least one sequence of arbitrary length to a single bit, and every lossless compression scheme must have an expected compression ratio over all data of 1:1. Hence knowing the domain constraints is important!)
We haven't looked much into WebP as an animation container. And since it's only supported by Chrome (and will likely remain that way) we are not currently considering it. WebM and MP4 both have pretty good codecs for video; definitely a lot better than GIFs, that's for sure.
You can just display the "annotate" dialog outside the main text. Also it's pretty annoying that it wants me to click just to take me to a login screen. Fuck this.
Flappy Bird: What I Did for the Pandora Version
Alsace and Lorraine have been historically part of the Germanic world (though it is quite true that the populations preferred to remain French). Can I take it that you won't have strong grounds to object if Merkel sends a few divisions over the border?
The actual paper with the theorems: http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609
I mean they have no way to know you're working remotely instead of being a tourist.
Show HN: uval, an agnostic validation library for Node.js
Does connectedness through social media like facebook, twitter, e-mail or even calling through phones contribute to happiness?
How? I get not having Outlook and Office, but Ubuntu's desktop environment is way ahead of Windows.
When Google, Facebook, or Microsoft acquire a service I use and love is it still the internet I deserve? Not all centralisation is done through natural, market forces. Sometimes Big Internet uses its bottomless purse to keep itself out in front.
I assume they just moved their servers to another country.
From the recent Globe & Mail article posted here [1], I can only hope we can all soon enjoy in this part:

Perhaps the story should have ended there. The delights of sugar were largely in control of the rich, it’s true, and their patronage of an exclusive ingredient meant that its identity was bent to their showy, needless ideas of extravagance. Instead of feeding the poor, the malleable carbohydrate was turned into a medium of edible and ornamental sculpture. Banquets were eaten off plates spun from sugar. Master confectioners perfected the art of sugar boiling and produced trees and elephants and even crackling tablecloths out of lowly cane syrup.

“Obviously it was overkill,” says Elizabeth Abbott, author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History. “For the very rich who had money to waste, sugar was the perfect form of conspicuous consumption. And if a little was good, then more, more, more was really good.”

I want myself a sugar Eiffel Tower..

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8162545
Ask HN: How to find a tax accountant for your startup?
I have been running a startup for a while now.

Recently I found out that my current tax accountant is a douchebag. Now I have to find a new one.

Most people here probably have a network of entrepreneurial friends and find a tax accountant this way. I am a pretty introverted tech guy without much contacts. So I have to go some other route. Any ideas?

This probably differs from country to country. I am in Germany.
Cluster Topologies – Dragonfly
A tale of postmortems
Yes, that happened to me several times as well until I figured out there was content down there once.
Please. Stop Using Git
I have been playing the contrarian to this idea since... 1998 I believe? (that was on the Italian usenet RPG group).

My point: unless you want to play an RPG _exclusively_ as a miniatures tactical game, the GM has to be able to "cheat" sometimes in order to adjust things.
If you accept this premise, "automated bookeeping systems" like Surface or any other kind of computer assisted combat processor risk becoming a burden: as soon as you decide that the killing blow from (or to) an NPC has to be changed in order not to spoil the fun of your players the system will go out of synch with the shared narrative, and you either have to manually realign it, or accept that yeah, the death really happened, no matter how detrimental to the rest of the adventure.

Also, it tends to negate any attempt at being creative in using spells or even just inventing novel tactics: if the computing model hasn't it hardcoded, there is literally no way to use a decorative mirror on the other side of the room to hit your enemy in the back with your beam weapon, for example.

So, Surface is great for wargames, a complicated and ultimately limiting system for RPGs.
An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology
Application Security Training App
Any comments on the features are welcomed of course -- still unsure of what to add, what to adapt, ...
It is nonsense to say that. If you think "Nazism sent people to concentration camps" is not a valid thing to say, then replace "Nazism" with "Jainism [0]" or "postmodernism".

Nazism entails the belief that a group of humans is inferior to other humans and that they can be destroyed. The arrow "someone is Nazi" -> "someone sends people to concentration camps" follows from their ideology. It would be absurd to say that Jainists or postmodernists send people to concentration camps, because nothing about their beliefs suggests a destruction of other people!

Saying that people's -isms "don't do anything" is dangerously morally relativist. Don't pretend that meaningful things cannot be said about the consequences Nazist beliefs might have. -isms are an important categorization of what kind of software people are running on their brains. It is useful in distinguishing what kind of destructive behaviour that software can result in.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism
Why not to let the user decide when he wants to achieve full GC (As Passenger is doing it between requests) and so avoid the performance regression this patch brings?