skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bizarre choice of language even in 1996. Guess even they weren't immune to all the enterprise and WO-RA and OOP hype back then.

What's it written in now?
Can someone explain to me how this was posted on Google Groups when Google wasn't really around?
There's a big difference from developing the FIRST rocket and developing A rocket. The first one is now built. We now have the people with the experience. It can (and is!) being done.

I'm not arguing the price of the first rockets that NASA built at all. I'm arguing that SpaceX didn't have an extra hundred billion of secret NSA black money that they used in addition to the publicly known about billion that we can be sure was spent.

You can't argue that because NASA spent $20B or whatever in 1960's dollars to get us to the moon that somehow SpaceX's $1B rocket is ACTUALLY a $21B rocket. You could argue that if SpaceX had to develop everything from scratch it would cost a lot more than $1B, but they didn't.

Similarly not everything that it would take to go to Mars is going to have to be engineered from scratch. Especially as launch prices keep coming down. If you could get to orbit for $100/lb it's only 10x as expensive as overnight air freight and at that point weight wouldn't even be a real issue anymore.

Is it kind-of crazy to talk about $100/lb launches right now? Yeah sure. But Musk has said that it's $200k worth of fuel to launch a Falcon 9, which has a 30klb payload to LEO. That's $6/lb in marginal cost plus whatever overhead on the rocket. Suddenly $100/lb doesn't look quite so batshit insane.
It's not completely arbitrary, it's mostly based on ISO 3166 which is in turn derived from the names of countries. So on the contrary, it was a very deliberate assignment of two letter codes to territories.

If the islanders had not been forcibly displaced in the 1960s, they would most probably have been had some say in the governance of .io, as other British overseas territories have done for their respective domains.
I think that's a key point, the earlier you can catch the problem the less frustrating for both sides. There is https://www.npmjs.org/package/commitplease for commit hooks but it's still handy to have something audit pull requests.
Do people prefer not using Makefiles? I ask because Makefiles are a standard part of my workflow, and while I know I can 'go build' or 'go [whatever]' I still cling to my Makefiles as a preferred tool.
I'm confused, is there some other way we're supposed to indicate something is a link now? I thought was considered bad practice to mess with link styling too much for usability reasons.
Google Groups contains an archive of most of Usenet.

"Google Groups became operational in February 2001, following Google's acquisition of Deja's Usenet archive. (Deja News had been operational since 1995.)" src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups
This is such a gem. It feels good seeing a tech giant asking a beginner-level question like this... It alleviates any tendency towards imposter-syndrome.
Sure. The question is whether your body can sufficiently adapt to voluntary dietary choices that it would be cruel for a prison to feed you food that you can no longer tolerate. If you can find "some" of it, then I would say yes, a mature society should be inclined to treat this as a legitimate concern.

Whether there's any particular guarantee of this happening is another question entirely and completely irrelevant. It would be relevant if you could determine that there is a guarantee this won't happen, but that's it.
> you realise that at least half the taxi drivers are taking the piss

This is really not the case with my London cab experience. These guys are super professional. In many other cities I've found cabs taking the scenic route but never with black cabs. I feel your 'half' claim extremely inflated off probably what was very few bad experiences.
Ah, an excellent point. The TrueType font format apparently does specify an underline position and height [1], though there's no mention of any allowance for this descender-dodging feature. The fact that font formats defer the actual drawing of the underline to the renderer gives me some hope. This seems to highlight the issue of web browsers having different font rendering needs from other apps, since underlining is so much more prevalent.

[edit] Obviously, it's a lot easier to fix this issue with a single font, as Apple has done in Messages, than to fix it well in every font.

With regards to this implementation, I'd rather not have to worry about the background, font and select background colors for every link. Applying text shadows over gradient-drawn underlines is an inspired hack that I'll have to remember, just in case, but I really wish there were a better way.

Maybe we should push for a 'text-mask-underline' CSS property that accepts radius, hardness and opacity values, in order to apply a fade to the underline around text descenders. [/edit]

[1] http://fontforge.github.io/fontinfo.html, http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=...
Server side: The thing that turns me off running Discourse on my own is that it won't run on the $5/DigitalOcean instance very well - the minimum specs seem very high for me.

Client side: Ember seemed very very slow to me on a Nexus 5 and (2012) Nexus 7 - has that changed at all?
The Founder's Dilemna's had a good writeup on him. He knows what he's doing.
Zynga may have stopped the bleeding for now
> I also moved to Dropbox as my cloud storage, because Google Drive still does not have a Linux client.

For USD 15, Insync[1] can help you with that.

[1] https://www.insynchq.com/
Is Y Combinator a slave trade?
I've started to understand something about you guys watching from Southern California and getting some run off from your culture. This vesting thing in technology and minute percentage is all about slave trading. VC capital these days is just finding talented people, giving them a tiny amount of hope in meaningless percentages for 3-4 year stretches (much like prison) and then buying and selling them. It is interesting, but also sad. I guess if I ever get enough money maybe I'll join in, but it is in fact wasteful from all of the good ideas of the slaves will be spent into products less valuable than what they could probably create on their own.
Is it just me or do those numbers look really bad for a software company.

They spend as much on General Administrative as they do on R&D and they spend 3.6x , more on marketing and sales then they do on R&D.
A while ago I tried to track down the initial check-in comments for a number of open source projects, with mixed results.

http://jcooney.net/post/2011/06/22/First-Check-in-Comments-f...

The Go one is particularly interesting.
You can do this, and I have done this. If you're a somewhat normal person, they probably don't have anything on you. They had no information about me, and most of them included letters saying "we would appreciate it if people stopped sending us these requests because we have much less information than you think we do, and it costs money for us to process these requests."

Here's the site that I used to create the letters I sent for each FOIA request: http://www.getmyfbifile.com/
1) the displaced people are adequately compensated for their loss

The occupier always has bigger guns, more power, and no opposition from a third party. They don't need to compensate.

2) they are given freedom to move to a place where they can enjoy human rights and make an adequate living.

Still a world full of refugees being smuggled into countries as illegal immigrant because what countries will accept them?

The only people who are moved and given (1) or (2) are ones that have a sufficiently good BATNA.

"This is going to be controversial" --- I'd say so. I almost thought it was a troll.
Why limit yourself to just underlining links? Why not some other convention? I played around with this a bit over a decade ago: http://www.conman.org/people/spc/writings/hypertext/fragment... (note: In the twelve years since I wrote that, most of the links offsite are now dead, which is another issue with links).

At first, the links in the "fragment" are invisible. You can toggle among that, single angle quotes (not used in English, which is why I picked that option), small bullet points on either end, and the default HTML underline.
This was originally posted on the "comp.lang.java" Usenet group (read about Usenet on Wikipedia if that was before your time). A website called "DejaNews" used to archive Usenet content, and provide a way for noobs to post via the web. Google bought DejaNews almost 15 years ago, and rebranded it as "Google Groups".

Eventually, Google Groups came to be a glorified mailing list service. However, originally it was just a web wrapper around Usenet... and can still be used for that today.
Now that they have fixed the garbage collector. However, how much of that 250MB is built up after the fork, and how much is static? I actually don't have that answer.
Facebook loses $24,420 a minute during outages
I appreciate your criticisms.

1) I'm not disputing that it was wrong for UK to evict the Chagossians. I'm only disputing that the Chagossians have some sort of fundamental human right to return all these years later, just because their grandfathers used to live there.

2) Yes, many leading philosophers of previous centuries used to think very highly of property rights, but this trend has greatly diminished in the last 50 years or so, especially in Anglo-American political philosophy.

In any case, I'm pretty sure that if I offered a significant premium over the prevailing market price, most people will be happy to sell their home and move elsewhere. Especially if I also offered to cover their cost of moving and lost wages while they look for a new job. (That's roughly what I think every government should offer when they need to relocate people.)

3) I totally agree. It was wrong for the UK to move them without their consent. But what is done is done, and now it's time to ask what to do about it.

If I break your phone, property rights mean that you have the right to make me compensate for your material losses. It doesn't mean that you have the right to make me restore your broken phone to its original condition, no matter how much sentimental value it might have had for you.

4) That's a genuine problem. If it is impossible to ensure an equal or greater quality of life for the relocated population, perhaps that's a good reason not to relocate them in the first place. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a country like UK would be unable to arrange a fantastic life (at least materially) for a few hundred islanders no matter where in the world they were. They were simply unwilling to do it, just as they were unwilling to consult the locals before deciding to lease Chagos to the Americans.

tl;dr: Something very bad happened. But making it right is not simply a matter of resetting HEAD to a previous commit.
I don't know if you can draw a conclusion from those numbers alone, but it's typical for a SaaS business to measure Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Lifetime Value (LTV) of the typical customer. Sales and marketing seem to be the majority of the CAC, but you can't tell the LTV from revenue numbers alone.
Murder is killing someone when it's illegal. Otherwise it's not murder. Yay circular logic! Oh you were defending yourself? Then it's not murder. Oh, you're a soldier? Then it's not murder. Oh, you're a cop? Then it's not murder.
So on the topic of unfair bans and the new system, here is a useful way for you to both improve transparency and figure out for yourself if the new system is working.

Post a list of comments which were [dead]ed under the new system but would not have been [dead]ed under the old system.

If the list contains a bunch of comments like "u r a gay homoz", you'll make a pretty convincing case (both to yourself and everyone else) that the new system is awesome. If the list contains a bunch of "I'm concerned about the security implications of ordinary users putting significant money into bitcoin..." then maybe the new system isn't so awesome.

[edit: I realize it's probably too late for this to be seen, perils of posting from IST.]
> If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it

The Republicans have been generally against Net Neutrality since before Obama became President. (Bills on the issue first started being submitted in 2006.)
Buchenwald a Dumb Dumb Portrayal of Evil [documentary]
Some useful context about Page's programming abilities from Steven Levy's book, "In the Plex" (which, IMO, is a must-read, as much fun if not better than the Jobs biography):

> Since Page wasn’t a world-class programmer, he asked a friend to help out. Scott Hassan was a full-time research assistant at Stanford, working for the Digital Library Project program while doing part-time grad work. Hassan was also good friends with Brin, whom he’d met at an Ultimate Frisbee game during his first week at Stanford.

> Page’s program “had so many bugs in it, it wasn’t funny,” says Hassan. Part of the problem was that Page was using the relatively new computer language Java for his ambitious project, and Java kept crashing. “I went and tried to fix some of the bugs in Java itself, and after doing this ten times, I decided it was a waste of time,” says Hassan. “I decided to take his stuff and just rewrite it into the language I knew much better that didn’t have any bugs.” He wrote a program in Python—a more flexible language that was becoming popular for web-based programs—that would act as a “spider,” so called because it would crawl the web for data. The program would visit a web page, find all the links, and put them into a queue. Then it would check to see if it had visited those link pages previously. If it hadn’t, it would put the link on a queue of future destinations to visit and repeat the process.

> Since Page wasn’t familiar with Python, Hassan became a member of the team. He and another student, Alan Steremberg, became paid assistants to the project. Brin, the math prodigy, took on the huge task of crunching the mathematics that would make sense of the mess of links uncovered by their monster survey of the growing web. Even though the small team was going somewhere, they weren’t quite sure of their destination. “Larry didn’t have a plan,” says Hassan. “In research you explore something and see what sticks.”

Levy, Steven (2011-04-12). In The Plex (p. 18). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

edit: Given this rewrite from Java into Python in the early history of one of Stanford's most famous exports, I find it kind of amusing that Stanford's intro to CS course teaches Java.
Again, IANAL, but roughly:

1) Different entirely. First, "mineral rights" are decided in various ways, but one of those is actual possession of the overlying real estate. So, when one's land is stolen, one's valuable mineral resources might also be stolen. The connection between the string "io" and the Chagos Islands is much more tenuous.

2) Not quite what I meant. If ICANN or somesuch were to decide to repossess ".io" from UK and give the proceeds to the Chagos Islands Refugees' Association, I would applaud. Arguably, other displaced and conquered peoples might similarly deserve a TLD. The point is that a process must be followed, and until it is the Chagossians have no particular claim to this or any other alphabetic string.
SpaceX Developing Micro Satellites
Thank you for your reasonable perspective. This open source criticism seems particularly endemic for developer tools that aren't backed by a cloud service. There are very, very few companies that have made money with open source tools in this space and they typically require huge VC investments to get to a place where the product is good enough to warrant large enterprise support contracts and professional services.
Two impressive things: Founder still owns more % than any investor (27.3%) and his Directors & VPs (12 people) together own 68.3% !
The Cost of Features (2013)
No, it's a lottery. You put in hard work and an idea, and in return for giving up a (small) stake you get to attempt to change your luck. If you're accepted the one thing that is certain is that YC is out some cash. And YC is one of the best lotteries in that they are actually on your side.

Calling anything a slave trade when clearly all parties are in there by their own volition is incredibly dumb and a pretty bad insult to anybody that's the victim of actual slavery.

Just imagine: YC has MANY more applicants than they have slots, I figure if they were enslaving people then there would be a lot of attempts to leave rather than to get into the doors.

They're creating those products that they would be creating on their own, but probably with a higher chance of success.

Your account is all of 45 days old and you still haven't figured this out?
Facebook Messenger now used by more than 500M people
$7 for a large serving is absurd. Bone broth is the easiest thing to make, and it's made from the scraps you normally throw away. Only in New York would (and could) someone charge so much for this.
> That said, I don't really see the argument that it is somehow their land.

The argument is that they had lived there for generations and made it very much their homeland - only to be turfed out at the whim of a remote, overbearing colonial power.
Unless you also need high density multi-tenancy in which case you probably want to use mpm-itk for security..
Perfect timing! I just finished Surface Detail about thirty minutes ago. :)
Michel Foucault, on the Role of Prisons (1975)
Microsoft email app for iOS bug: emoji instead of icon text
Enterprise software companies spend a very small amount on R&D. Usually < 15%: http://www.zdnet.com/r-and-d-spend-critical-but-no-fixed-for...
Tell him that the de-regulation Republicans want will get us the Enron of the Internet.
The worry is that "bullying" can be redefined to mean almost anything. A scathing critique of a bad business or politician could be construed as bullying.

We should also be careful about criminalizing bullies, since a large portion of them are young (and quite possibly bullied or abused themselves). It's a problem, and it needs more attention, but rushing to criminalize it seems hasty to me.
Exactly. Quality content will always trickle to the top, downvoting just means to produce an echo chamber and disincentivize actual conversations.
Do those preclude talking about what you're doing?

Separated with an almost 3 year old.
The Sphere Is Solid: VSphere Hardening, the Right Way
Larry wouldn't hire Larry.
Another vote for Fastmail. The best provider in the industry.
Aside from all the serious problems, their puny budget being probably the biggest, what always bugged me was the reality show aspect... What an ugly way to even think about achieving such a great feat. Are they picking their candidates like Big Brother does, with the egos and sex appeal? Will there be fighting? Sex? I mean, if the viewers get bored, and this will be a pretty long show with a pretty small cast, what happens then? And how will people even react to watching someone die in a "show" like this? Wouldn't this actually be the most perverse form of human exploitation ever conceived?..

I don't think this nasty idea even deserves this much work to write about it. I'm sorry for Josh, but I hope they do not succeed. I do not want to see the horror that this could turn into. Let's not mar space and Mars with this bullshit.
I don't think they'll get more visibility at all. A name is but a sequence of letters, angersock to me does not mean more or less than logicallee and I'll read both of you with equal interest. Of course other people might have a different set of criteria but the reputation of a person should be the sum of their output and interactions, not <= 10 alpha characters picked from a limited set. And what better story than someone who enters a forum under a moniker like that and decides to change his ways. Beats the alternative!
> You are reading too much into this. Obama is merely adding this phrase to protect himself from those that will intentionally try to twist his words.

Actually, much the same language has been in both the 2010 FCC Open Internet order and the draft for a new order earlier this year, its not something that was original in Obama's statement.
UK supermarket trialing checkout-less shopping
The people sticking to C++ aren't using it for the sheer joy of manual memory management, they're using it because they either require or enjoy the ability to exert predictable control over programs in terms of both execution speed and memory usage. Haskell, being a lazily-evaluated garbage-collected language, offers little to these people.

Rust has emphatically never been "Haskell with manual memory management". That conception is entirely incorrect, typeclasses or no. If you must frame Rust in terms of prior languages, consider it to be an ML with an extreme focus on zero-cost abstractions and pervasive, memory-safe concurrency.
There's something appealing about that theory, in that it would seem to stop buck-passing. I just wonder how well my own nation would have done in correcting the Supreme Court. Would we still have some of the awful things we had in the past? Would we we already have some of the great things we'll have in the future?
Would like multiple profiles in sync. e.g. a Work profile, a Home profile, maybe a mobile.

Some things belong just at work or just at home.

Some things aren't ever accessed on mobile.
So what you're saying is, you own it entirely.

Dropbox has:

- Access to everyone's data.

- Control over everyone's data.

- Control over the clients used to access that data.

What is actually private? Nothing.

What do users "own"? None of their tools.

SaaS makes the world a worse place, one rent-seeking product at a time.
This choice came down to typographical best practices. Butterick, a well-respected typographer, recommends in Practical Typography not using underlines for stylistic emphasis. [1]

[1]: http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html
Human-powered Sorts and Joins [pdf]
Multi-core optical fibers achieve 255 Tbps
Possibly "Principal Software Engineer at Fidelity Investments" http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joseph-millar/8/a09/6b6
It's a very nice idea — I always like smartening up the look of the Web — but the resulting links are ghastly. If your word starts or ends with a descending letter (e.g. "ghastly"), then the underline looks like it omits the first and last letters. It breaks the semantics of what the underline means — any bit that's underlined is supposed to be the link, and if it's not underlined it's not a link.

They also made the mistake of showing a link that includes the word "Typography", which has an underline so broken up and interrupted that it's distracting (which devindotcom also pointed out). It's linked, then it's not, then it's linked, then it's not!

So yeah, I have to give them credit for a good idea and a clever implementation, but it just doesn't work out in the end.
Very much looking forward to that, it will have two good effects, it will take the edge of hellbanning and it will reduce the load on the moderators. Three good effects, and give those that have been hellbanned (if they are aware of it) a reason to try to be extra good in the future.

Four good effects, and it will make hellbanning more effective (because occasionally there will be answers to a comment). Five good... Wait, let me come in again.
Seems like data viz is being consolidated in the industry. Wonder if it's more appealing for B2Bs to have their own solutions.
From a certain point of view, all work is slavery. But I think if you met some actual modern-day slaves and some actual startup founders, you would notice some important differences between their lives.
Yes, and notice how much of the run involves "forward" calls---that's when you stay on the same road, but it changes name. It's mindblowing.

If you want to track the run (it's accurate!) the starting point is right next to this node in OSM: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/279219489
Show HN: Girl Talk's All Day, Annotated
Gruvi: an asynchronous I/O library for Python