skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't get how this is going to replace photoshop.

The images will not look as good, or as clean as a regular photoshopped image, I doubt that automated image editing is that advanced right now.

The examples they gave, is probably the best that was available, I bet on average, the results don't look nearly as good or clean.

But hey, I could be wrong.
Saying employment is essentially a form of slavery is making light of slavery. Just because some of us are lucky and privileged enough to work on what we choose, that is not how the rest of the world operates. The majority of the world feels lucky and privileged to work for someone else and have the opportunity to provide for their family.

No, employment is not 'sort of' a form of slavery, it's not even close. Slavery is a very dark practice that removes choice and imprisons people, employment breeds opportunity. So I'd argue, they're opposites.

When you are trying to feed your family or one of the many unemployed in even the richest countries, I'm sure hearing someone compare employment to slavery would be extremely insulting.
Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure
No, I'm not interested but thank you. I was speaking in the, "If I was a first-time entrepreneur" voice (which I am definitely not).
Sn0wBreeze - All New PwnageTool For Windows
iH8sn0w teamed up with DarkMalloc giving birth to "Sn0wBreeze" the new PwnageTool for windows which is currently under beta-testing and is soon coming our way, do check the teaser video after the jump.
I think the biggest thing people are missing here is one of the best advantages: Demos!

Currently Apple doesn't give a way to distribute demo copies of software. But if your app is already a Flash project, you can export that to the web in a trial form for people to play and test out. We've had videos and screenshots, but this is a much more effective way of selling.

Check out an example: http://www.muchosmedia.com/justletters/ All you've got to do to build a demo is export to SWF instead of IPA. Easy cheezy.
Ask HN:Is anyone working on crime related sites?
I've been tinkering with the idea of creating a crime reporting site but haven't come across many start-ups in this space. I was wondering if anyone is doing or has done anything similar?
I've been burned several times by missing semicolons when minifying my code. Now I make sure they're always there. I'm also running everything through JSLint.
Justify the notion.
That example isn't very reasonable. Obviously, one would expect semicolons to be inserted after lines that form complete statements. It's not hard to ensure that intermediate lines don't do that. It's done for other languages that don't use semicolons.
Economist.com slipping behind the paywall
There's no permalink, but this just showed up in my inbox:

Dear Reader,

I'd like to inform you about important changes at Economist.com.

Beginning October 13th, we will be limiting access to certain sections of our site to subscribers only. Over the past few years, Economist.com has become a hub for intelligent discussion, with news commentary, blogs and an award-winning debate series. We will continue to encourage both subscribers and non-subscribers to participate in those conversations. We will also enhance the experience we offer our most loyal readers by expanding our subscribers-only features.

Currently, all content published within the last year is free of charge. Soon, only articles and commentary published prior to the last 90 days will be accessible without a subscription. The print edition contents page, which offers a convenient way to browse articles and features from the latest issue of The Economist, will also be limited to subscribers only.

Through these complementary aspects of Economist.com, we will continue to foster intelligent discussion and debate, while enhancing the value we bring to our community of subscribers.

I hope you'll continue to visit the site and enjoy all it has to offer.

Sincerely,

Ben Edwards, Publisher
Economist.com
School Rules Stifle Gifted Student
Always found it interesting, but haven't worked on it. Only thing that comes to mind are EveryBlock's(.com) crime sections.
Not that I'm adding to the discussion, but I'm very impressed by the tone of this discussion. Even on HN (where I tend to find people more willing to debate (as opposed to argue)) discussions like this tend to get nasty. Cheers to this!
The school district's response to the submitted article:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/10/_sin...
I found it ironic that the latter half seemed to be describing Stallman's tactics as "FUD" without actually using that term. This tactic being famously employed by Microsoft.

Of course, another layer of irony is that before Microsoft became the safe choice, this was a favourite tactic of IBM, who are now considered an open source friendly company.
I like that he doesn't call them "design patterns".
The question is what do you do with the data?

And where do you get cash?

If your working closely with the Police forces etc. I suppose they might show an interest. But we work with police forces and I can tell you they are a pain to convince on "new technology" :)
I guess to a certain extent, but for most use cases it just becomes irritating and makes people use url shorteners, txt spk etc.
I love his quote on the blog - "blogging is simple, it's real life that's complex in so many ways - Marius". Sure blogging is simple when you copy your content from others. Just run his articles through Copyscape and you find the original sources.
This is a significant development and seems to be win-win for both Adobe and Apple. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out and if iPhone App development in Windows/Flash is as seamless as Adobe is claiming. But if it is, along with the support for RTMP, Remote Shared Objects, AMF, and SQLLite, it could be a big boost for Adobe.
Many employees are reluctant to look for another job, especially if they have a family to support and/or the economy is not doing well.

And even if they do find another job, it may turn out to be even worse than the one they left.
I think you are confusing him with someone else.

After edit: I'll accept the response below to what I first wrote. But I wouldn't call Von Neumann "paranoid" in the setting of his times, which included the conquest of his native country.
Yes, it's easy to implement small, elegant languages in larger ones. It's also easier to implement powerful meta-level tools in small, elegant languages.

(Though to be fair, the Common Lisp library is pretty burgeoning.)
I recently found JS.Class:

http://jsclass.jcoglan.com/

It provides Ruby-style inheritance patterns for Javascript. Initially I was skeptical (most of the other attempts at adding OOP structure to JS have been awful), but it's simplified my code significantly. I've also found that it plays nicely with jQuery, as long as you know when to be functional and when to be object-oriented.
If this is for real, then why can't the same thing be done for music? Drum a beat, whistle a tune, sing a few notes - and let the software extract best-matching samples from a library of millions of songs.
Here's my belated take on it: http://geekstack.com/blog/opposite-of-a-dumb-toy/
Null-prefix certificate for paypal
This is at least interesting; articles from the last 90 days are for-pay, but once that window closes, it will be available for free.

How long until there's a reverse auction or minimum clearing level for articles? It seems the future of publishing news should be: pay for immediate access, as soon as the value (utility) drops to zero, make it free. "Free after 90 days or the first 10,000 subscribers see it"
Employment is not optional in practice for most people.
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...

(FWIW, I respect rms's purity of ideology, and I respect how it broadens the debate, but I don't think his extreme represents a desired end goal.)
I was thinking more along the lines of a social enterprise, maybe grant supported.

Local councils (here in the UK) may be more welcoming.
This resolution bears directly on anyone who publishes on the web, as UN resolutions have a way of becoming law. The purpose of this resolution clearly is to try and suppress all published criticism of Islam.

Nut grafs from the article:

His Egyptian counterpart, Ambassador Hisham Badr . . . praised the development by telling the Council that "freedom of expression . . . has been sometimes misused," insisting on limits consistent with the "true nature of this right" and demanding that the "the media must . . . conduct . . . itself in a professional and ethical manner."

The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . ." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."
photoshop + 24hours of work = awesome image

photoshop + 1h of work = worthless image

this snake oil thing + 1h of work = so-so usable image
Knots and Giant Spiders (intuitive problem solving)
There's a book out now called "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly". Throughout history, in various types of governments and economies w/ varying degrees of regulation, there have always been financial disasters. There will always be financial disasters. So the issue is not more or less regulation. The issue is how to quickly recover from the next inevitable disaster. The best thing the government can do is quickly pay down the debt so that, in 10-15 yrs, it can borrow like mad during the next depression.
DannoHung is probably talking about von Neumann.
I don't think very many people are debating that.

I wonder if the major disconnect between RMS and deIcaza is that deIcaza deals with the people at Microsoft, whereas RMS only sees them as a corporation. Thus, deIcaza might see them as a diverse and malleable entity and RMS would not. Of course, I don't have the inside scoop here, so I'm just conjecturing and could be completely wrong.
The problem I forsee there is faked reports and it providing a forum for neighbourhood disputes.

Any attempt to produce "crime figures/data" for an area might be subject to a lot of bias.

(not that I think it's a bad idea; just some thoughts thatr occurred to me)

Why not give it a shot: if there is no one in the sector it doesn't mean it is a dead end :D (it might mean it is a tough climb though)
As far as testing goes, I have a simple approach.

If I just wrote some code and had to poke at it in a REPL with some different inputs to check if it works, then I should take whatever I did and turn it into a test. With a good testing framework, like the one built into Clojure (formerly clojure.contrib.test-is and now clojure.test), it's really easy. I just copy from my REPL and paste it into the appropriate test file, along with the expected results.

If I find a bug, I fix it, write a test for it, and also copy whatever I did to check my work from the REPL into a test file.

That's it. I routinely change code around with all the confidence TDD advocates claim. I don't test trivialities. I don't test if my database connection was correctly established --- but I will test database connection loss error handling if I put any non-trivial logic in there.

I'll often write a little snippet of sample code for an API I'm working on, but I never write a full formal test in advance. It makes letting the actual API evolve as it grows too cumbersome.
Not exactly - twitter, unlike facebook, is asymmetric, so you expect a large percentage of users who are just listening. That doesn't mean you can ignore them - they are the audience.
With any of these social platforms there is a small percentage of creators and a large population of consumers. For example, look at Youtube. The same can happen for twitter...a lot of people may just consume the tweets of celebrities or other feeds. Low tweeting is not a big issue. The consumption traffic continues to grow
Maybe I haven't delved deep enough into it (and I would love if you would correct any misconceptions to what I'm about to write).

* It's kind of a pain to have a form object that deals with multiple models. I always find myself having to put {{ form_for_model_1 }} followed by {{ form_for_model_2 }} in my templates. Maybe it just seems messy to me. I wish there was a way that formset_factory could take forms for different models so that it would all validate together and print together. I guess it isn't such an inconvenience that I should complain so much.

* It would be really nice if I could raise ValidationErrors on the model and have them caught by the form class.

* It's a bit annoying that Django's form library has a CharField which gets <input type="text"> and there's no TextField to give one a <textarea>. Yeah, I know you can specify widgets, but still.

And I guess what I really dislike is dealing with Generic/Polymorphic relationships and forms which is also a pain in Rails. I guess I'm still partial to Rails' <% form_for %>. Partly that's because with Django I can't add random parameters (in the hash of params). Like, I can't do forms.CharField(render_alongside_last=True) in Django since it doesn't take 'render_alongside_last' as a parameter. With Rails and form generators, I can put in directions like that so that I can do more than just the same rendering for each field without having to custom do every field display. Plus, syntactically, it just seems nice as you nest things and such.

And Rails has some nice ways of dealing with related objects and automatically setting the foreign keys and such with accepts_nested_attributes_for :model. Since the ModelForms are separate, they don't get that automatically and you have to add the key from the other object.

Just to reiterate, I would love to be proven wrong on any of these since I'm primarily a Django developer today.
The UNIX methodology is to have a large number of processes cooperating to provide functionality. "fork" is the fastest way to create a new process; so the reason for fork is to provide a system call that creates a process really fast.

Windows philosophy, on the other hand, is to have monolithic programs that solve everything by themselves. They infrequently need to start new processes, so fork is not viewed as important.
Apollo Flight Journal - Apollo Operations Handbook. Volume 1.
Not to be a broken record, but I think these accounts are setup to "listen" to the brands, people, celebrities, products, etc that the subscriber is interested in. Most people don't blog, but lots of people read blogs. Twitter isn't really a social network, it's a subscriber broadcast medium.
Interesting how this story has (very) slowly made it's way from small mentions like Bruce Schneier's blog to big news outlets.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/ass_bomber.htm...

Of course it's not really much of a serious threat:

Lewis Page, an "improvised-device disposal operator tasked in support of the UK mainland police from 2001-2004," pointed out that this isn't much of a threat for three reasons: 1) you can't stuff a lot of explosives into a body cavity, 2) detonation is, um, problematic, and 3) the human body can stifle an explosion pretty effectively (think of someone throwing himself on a grenade to save his friends).
Interesting idea of trying to force math into your everyday life. Since college, the highest level of math I've used is geometry and trigonometry, but none of it was for programming. It's only been useful a few building projects around the house.
They dont have to work though. There are state benefits.
Server 2008 R2: Active Directory Functional Levels
I think the crime reporting would have to be anonymous, and maybe find a way to match similar instances (from different witnesses)
And they have the option of finding out if job #2 was worse than job #1. In slavery you don't have that option either.
"If someone has X and has the potential to instead choose Y, they might be unhappy because X was better than Y all along"

Let's ban choice!
Samba uses fork to create new instances of itself to handle each connected user, and I am often grateful that it does that instead of using threads. Since each user has a separate process, something going wrong inside the process means that the process dumps core, but none of the other users ever notice. Even the user whose smbd process crashed doesn't notice much except a brief delay while he reconnects.

No real need to monitor (except to try to catch the bug that caused the crash in the first place), and no need to manually restart anything. It all just keeps going.

Basically, a server process using fork has a lot of resilience built in. In contrast, a crash in a threaded process will kill all the threads at once, and all users feel the pain.
Not unless they run out of ink and paper first.
And I have the opposite opinion. Ideology = a lack of flexibility and a very closed mind, neither of which is a constructive state and achieves little in the long run.
Can you blame them? They offer extremely insightful analysis and great discussion; I think my print+web subscription is very much worth it.

At least give them credit for not completely closing up or charging for old material. They do honestly seem that they are trying to keep as much content available as possible.
It's a continuum. Employment is for smaller time increments, and the enforcement is handled by a third party.

That said, you might want to reconsider things in both directions. If someone has a very short time horizon, but is capable of doing useful labor, a slave owner will probably treat them better than they'd treat themselves. This is a very reactionary view, which happens to be exemplified by the progressive political movement -- conservatives are okay with letting somebody, e.g., survive on payday loans and live in a flophouse; liberals would rather own more of their economic output and constrain their freedom for their own good.
MoD 'how to stop leaks' document is leaked
What's there to respect about purity of ideology? Being pure and ignorant of other opinions is the easy way out. Learning and understanding alternate points of view and working with those people is what's worth respect, imho.
RMS isn't insane. It's just that he's willing to extrapolate his ideas into seemingly insane territory. He is right in that corporations are making scary inroads into our rights online and with regards to privacy. But we may not agree in terms of what to do about it.

I think FOSS can "embrace and extend" just as well as Microsoft!
Why not ban irresponsible personal decisions, instead? Maybe we could punish them with poverty, so they'd happen less often.
The Future of Mice
I think people are not thinking about women bombers when they mention (1)...
Hi5 | Tus Amigo(a)s. Tu Mundo.
I honestly think RMS is a religious nut in a closet. Sure he has his achievements, but that doesn't give him the right to say what is right and what is wrong. Times have changed and there are people who know better than him about the current problems. Mono is itself cool enough that the community around it will fight against any onslaught. We don't need dictators anymore, we need explorers.
What about surgically implanted bombs in fat people? (Like in that movie I won't name just to avoid spoiling it for the small number of people who haven't seen it.) Does anyone have a good idea of whether that's a severe risk? Can anyone have a sizeable bomb surgically implanted and live long enough with it inside them to recover from the surgery enough to walk around normally?
"Strong opinions are very useful to other people" - Brian Eno

Very opinionated people, even if narrow-minded or wrong, are useful to conversations.

If you don't have an opinion, you can just say, "Wow. Yeah. I agree with him."

If you do have an opinion, you can reflect against that simplistic strong-opinion to explain why it's wrong.

Either way, it's good to have some black and white in the paint palette.
Now, if benefits didn't stop after a while, and were available instantly, then you might see employment working very differently.
There's a slippery slope here, and it worries me, particularly as the FTC can pretty much just make it up as they go along. I want to live in a nation ruled by laws, not one ruled by men.
Also, employment is set against certain standards. It typically does not involve whipping or rape. Just a minor detail really.
Google asks Jon Skeet not to renew his MS MVP
It is nice to have schema updates as part of ActiveRecord right there in Rails for you, but South is so easy to set up I don't feel like it can be considered a win for Rails.
JS.Class - Ruby-style Javascript
SlideShare Business : A new way to connect with customers
Depends on where you live. It's quite possible to live (albeit, not well) off the welfare state in most of Europe.

And even were it not, a particular place of employment can still be left.
I love citations from Brian Eno. It is nice to see some quotes from masters from different domains.
The I.B.M. approach is based on what the company describes as a “DNA transistor,” which it hopes will be capable of reading individual nucleotides in a single strand of DNA as it is pulled through an atomic-size hole known as a nanopore. A complete system would consist of two fluid reservoirs separated by a silicon membrane containing an array of up to a million nanopores, making it possible to sequence vast quantities of DNA at once.

If you can read individual nucleotides, down the road you just might be able to synthesize individual nucleotides, DNA strand, perhaps whole chromosomes. And do it with accuracy far greater then cell division, much better error detection. And this brings tissue manufacturing that much closer.
Obama Cuts Off Funding for Iranian Human-Rights Documentation
The Iranian government is trying to build nuclear weapons, the Iranian people -- who are our best chance of stopping them -- are rioting for their freedom and being beaten and killed (literally) for their trouble, and this is the support we give them.
Being pure and ignorant of other opinions is the easy way out.

There is nothing in ideological purity that demands ignorance of other opinions. And just because you're cognizant of someone's opinion, doesn't mean you have to agree. RMS can say what he wants, and I'm sure he's not ignorant of other's opinions. If you don't like what he says, don't do what he says. If you don't like his philosophy, maybe you shouldn't use GNU software? He doesn't force you to use any software. (Which is more than can be said for lots of corporations.)
Why my writing mistakes give me confidence in the internet
'Masters of light' win Nobel Physics Prize
you're right about the asymmetry, but let's not pretend that 75% of 60M are actively listening to anyone...

I would be stunned if that number was higher than 10%
What A Job Offer From Apple Looks Like
Yes, nowadays, Google "allocates" (the actual word that they use) new employees to projects.
What if the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt is actually justified? I don't think it's necessarily wrong to doubt or be uncertain that corporations have our best interests at heart.
As long as there are wild places in the world where you can hunt and gather, you are NOT forced to be employed. It's all optional. You don't need a cell phone, or a car or a house. You choose this lifestyle because you want the conveniences of "modern life". You can very easily strip off your clothes, go into the mountains of Alaska or wherever and live there, free of charge. May I suggest the first thing you do is kill a bear and make yourself a warm coat. You're going to need it.
To see some of the hoops that need to jumped through to emulate fork() on systems that don't have it, and the limitations of doing so, check out the perlfork man page.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlfork.html