skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're not directly voting against it. The referendum is carefully titled "Swiss law before foreign law" which would include the human right convention among every international law. The Advocates emotionally argue that the swiss should never be dictated by foreign judges, we can perfectly handle everything ourselves. Unfortunately a lot of people in Switzerland live on ivory towers, thinking their better than everybody else on the planet and agree with that statement.

The right wing fear machinery fed with millions of donation money has really poisoned the political climate over the last decade. Whether you agree with their points, a system like ours, where basically every citizen can trigger a nation wide vote about almost anything (e.g. reintroduction of death penalty) only works if the debates are driven by reason, not populism. The other parties recently jumped on the same train, saying it's the only way to defend against those scare mongers … sigh

I still love our system, it gives the people not only power but also a sense of responsibility. It's not the government that fucked things up – you did. But it doesn't make a country completely immune to dedicated actors with enough influence and money like many believe.
Something I've found useful is the sqldf package [0], which lets you use data frames as tables in SQL with all the power of joins and so on.

[0] https://code.google.com/p/sqldf/
C# also has it, and i've heard Java has got it as well, but I've never tested it in the latter.

I personally like being able to do it since it allows me to do away with the 2 extra lines auto indent puts in if i add brackets. That's a 50% reduction for a 4 line if. Maybe I should just buy a bigger monitor.
That question is like asking "can you tell me something the Twitter API solves that http does not?" - it doesn't make any sense. They are distinct layers. One builds on the other.

http+websocket is a way to set up a full-duplex stream of messages where messages are anything you like.

dbus does have that part, but then it defines additionally what the messages actually look like in enough detail to bind them to method calls; it defines semantics such as guaranteed ordering and errors; it defines a central bus daemon; it adds broadcast messages over the daemon; it adds security features to allow mixing user and system domains; it adds a way to locate the bus daemon; it adds a way to launch and track the lifecycle of named processes; etc, a number of other APIs. It is not just a socket.

Could you implement a dbus-equivalent using http? Sure. But http does not include a "free" implementation of dbus, any more than it includes an implementation of Twitter.

dbus-on-http would have to define how method signatures and types map into http, and then it would still have to actually implement the daemon with its features and semantics.

http wouldn't make any material difference here; it would have some bikeshed-level pros and cons, but not change the system design in a material way.
Thanks for pointing this out, we seem to have had a glitch with our automation. We have unlocked all the pages for the time being as we determine the problem and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.
Definitely - great advice. I've been out, had a good experience interviewing, but declined offers for those reasons. But still, I'm feeling like doing a few years for some big names might give me more options and flexibility in the long run.
No way. Yes, MOBAs have their place, but confined arenas give a very good game experience from massive, sprawling, unstructured, player-driven worlds. Truly good PvP-focused MMOs are much closer to Minecraft than they are to MOBAs, RTSs, or FPSs. You can't really compare the two.
Interesting fact about Git is that it was self hosting in two weeks, IIRC.
Suggest he try one of the better Lenovo ThinkPad models (maybe an L or W?).

In my experience the keyboard is better, the trackpad comparable, and the anti-reflective screen is much better for almost all purposes in almost all circumstances.

Anecdotal experience suggests they're more robust than Apple hardware too. A colleague killed her MacBook Air with a spilled drink; my L520 has a splash-proof keyboard that has resisted a few good spills.

Likewise, I've cracked the glass on a MacBook Pro (runs right to the edge of the screen; easy to close on a plug or cable) but never so much as scratched the screen on any of my ThinkPads (I've owned a few).

Oh, and the ThinkPad is designed to be user-serviceable too; I wore out the space bar on my L520 and replaced it courtesy a site that sells individual keys for that purpose.
This is part of the plot of Sidney Sheldon's If Tomorrow Comes. A woman on a cruise ship with two chess grandmasters bets a large amount of money that she can draw a game with each of them. Of course she plays them at the same time, one game with white, the other black.

It's hilariously improbable to chess players, but some of my non-playing friends thought it was clever.
Windows has such piss poor command line support that it's the only reasonable way to use a python REPL. Outside of Windows I don't think it really has much of a use.

Personally I'd choose iPython notebooks over IDLE on any platform but IDLE comes with python by default so it's easier in some situations like teaching a class.
In particular, hacking seems to be about doing things that are not by-the-book. So...how can it be learned?
It's an odd failing of incredibly smart people that their needs are the same as everyone else's. It seems to be very common (maybe dumb people make the same mistake as well, but you just don't notice it as much)
CoinBeyond: 0% Transaction Fees for Bitcoin Black Friday
I love Serial. But I love more the idea that I live in a world where such a show can exist and be successful.
NB: sqldf works by copying your data frame into a temporary SQLite database, running the query and then copying the data back. So it's not that fast.

Instead, learn a native R package like dplyr or data.table that supports all the power of SQL, and is v. v. fast.
Its common in Java too...
Its quite tasty for what it is - a quick, convenient, and inexpensive snack. You have to be quite the food snob to call it shockingly bad.
The lead programmer at my last job encouraged us to use it as a way to make sure our conditionals & foreach loops (PHP programmer) weren't doing too much. If we had to use braces, it was a sign to check it out and see if it could stand some refactoring.
I use a plugin called littlebrace for visual studio, which reduces brace lines to like 3 pt font. My C# code has started looking like Python :)
Stuxnet: named for files .stub (where config was stored) and mrxnet.sys (main driver), by Microsoft

Duqu: named for the "~DQ-" temporary files it created, by researchers in Hungary who found it and wrote report

Flame: is from a routine called "InstallFlame", so the malware name is likely same between discoverers and writers.

The naming convention is usually to find a unique identifier used in the malware. Portmanteau's are common. We often don't find out what the writers name was, although both Stuxnet and Flame were part of Operation Olympic Games[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Olympic_Games
The kernel does not have a stable ABI, and none of the developers really commit to significant backwards compatibility - they just maintain LTS kernel tree branches for those that want to stay in one spot.

The same thing happened with the gstreamer 0.x and 1.x forks, except every Linux release is effectively a new GST release, albeit the APIs userspace uses against the kernel rarely break, it is a huge spread of APIs and one or another usually does change each release.
Single reason - that it would be a great growth experience and maybe give me career options down the road. Thank you!
Yep - been playing FtB for several years now. In fact, it was an HN comment that tipped me off to FtB originally.
A perfect example of why "~x.indexOf(y)" may actually be better... you just messed up, as the alternative should be "x.indexOf(y) !== -1" or "x.indexOf(y) >= 0" or "x.indexOf(y)+1" ...

In any case, it's all a matter of style... because if you don't know that indexOf will return 0 for a positive match, you will still mess up.
Similar project for Python: https://github.com/rfk/pypyjs
It's interesting that this a concern, as this is a greater level of privacy than what we've enjoyed anywhere else. I'm thinking in real world contexts.
Why are there multiple main() functions? I've never seen this style before. Is it multi-process?
I think it's fair to assume the brain has some interpretation frameworks as good as javascript/html at least, even if it's a cheesy metaphor.
I do. Our server is kinda looking for new people actually. We're running modified monster with some additional tweaks to difficulty, such as Hunger Overhaul, Spice of Life, Zombie Awareness and Special Mobs.
The library becomes the de facto protocol. The difference is that there is a mindshare that updating libraries to stay current is less intrusive than having a protocol revision change break backwards compatibility.

I don't necessary think it would have been better, or even feasible, just that it is a situational quandary, not just the black and white "protocols always win". Protocols enable interoperability at the cost of rigidity and resistance to change. You should protocolize when you are are damn sure you aren't changing anything else, and there have been very few technologies where you can say the protocols conceived a decade ago are still problem free today.
Or use a better bracing style. Or move to significant whitespace.
Sure, but the whole point behind x265 is to provide better quality per bit than x264.
The problem is the person, not the game.

I started leading relatively large guilds and alliances (1000-6000 people) in a few MMOs at age 15. The experience and wisdom I gained from those experiences helped me greatly in my adult life. The games I played were very cutthroat and modeled off real-world politics, diplomacy, espionage, and warfare (the games in question were inspired by EVE and UO; I've also played those two, but not with leadership positions).

I'm now 22 and I frequently see parallels in my working life. I can think of many times I've leveraged some of my past experiences to help make decisions, especially when it comes to big-picture strategic problems.

Yes, it is easy to become extremely addicted to these kinds of games and it's tempting to sacrifice aspects of your personal or working life, but they can also offer a ton of fun and a ton of great learning opportunities. People just need to practice impulse control, and they need to set boundaries ("I won't login until I finish my homework for tomorrow", etc.).

I think MMOs like EVE should receive more study and writing in the scientific community, because it's a perfect example of a microcosm of some of the more "base" nature of human psychology and behavior.
Piano stairs
There's a bunch of different utilities in there. Each has it's own main() function, and they're compiled into a bunch of binaries.
Reminds me of the musical staircase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw
Could just be initializers for different modules maybe?
I've got to say, the liquid-catch-drain system Lenovo uses is pretty damned handy. It's one of those features you don't use very often (hopefully), but it's fantastic when you do need it.
XMedia Recode [1] can do all this as well. Looks quite similar as well, by the way.

But of course, it's not open-source, while Handbrake is.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMedia_Recode
There are multiple main() functions because there are multiple programs! Check out https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...
The number of inputs before a likely collision is more on the order of 2^80. Which is still pretty large.
For some strange reason I thought this was part of Alex Blumberg (also from This American Life)'s Gimlet Media - which he started in August this year, and which he's documenting at http://hearstartup.com.

Anyone know if the timing of Serial's debut was co-incidental, or if there's something happening between the two ex-TIL producers that we don't know about?
I know this will get me downvoted but I can't understand the fascination with Serial. Overall I found it quite a boring listen. Too many side paths that amount to not much at all, feel like it could have done with a harsh edit.

But it's production qualities are high quality and so anything that leads people to create more content at a similar level the better !
With ~~foo you will always get an integer that fits inside a 32-bit integer range... regardless of the input... invalid numbers will be 0. Whereas with a +foo you may get NaN (for an invalid decimal input).

Part of this is because bitwise operations will convert whatever the input value is to a 32-bit integer value before performing the operation, and not fail (invalid input becomes 0 opposed to NaN).
For a 1-man show, the production quality was pretty good. Discussion of possibilities, consulting with both chess databases and computer algorithms for potential moves, and a constant stream of high level analysis of possibilities and positions that allows even a novice like me to at least get a taste of what goes through the minds the these grandmasters.

I hope he keeps it up; it certainly has rekindled my appreciation for chess.
I think this was just an ad campaign at that traffic light and not actually going to be implemented everywhere in the city.

As far as how they built it, seems like basic computer vision.
The Gospel According to Alibaba's Ma: Love Amazon as Thyself
So https://github.com/v8/v8-git-mirror

They have a mirror and it appears that they are killing Google Code and I get 4 down votes NICE
You're leaving out many posts from earlier times where Pike explicitly tells people they're probably never going to get access to Plan 9. It was a research operating system, and even the name was selected to make it unmarketable.

In a nutshell, nobody ever cared how well it was received outside of Bell Labs.
I'm still convinced Urbit is some sort of elaborate ruse, I feel like most of the HN crowd feels the same.
Yes. This. We have a cushion (although a larger one would be better). There aren't a lot of comparable options here. Most of the jobs here are limited, being a step back in pay and either experience or benefits. I'm half-heartedly looking for remote work.
True, the birthday paradox definitely makes it a lot more likely, but as you say the odds should still be too low.
If you really wanted to simplify it, just use a Kinect. :)
I just recently started playing with R via Azure's new Machine Learning service. From what I have seen I am really impressed. It helps with the input and outputs of the data and makes it easy to turn your process in to a web service that can be easily consumed. I had planned on setting up some linux boxes to host R, but now I can just use Azure ML and not have to jack with it.
If anyone else finds the poor contrast / thin fonts hard to read, ctrl+a to select all text is as always a neat trick.
One thing you definitely don't want to do is take a team away from people who consider themselves to be engineers who happen to be in a people manager role (and have been for a long time and are considered by their team and the wider engineering org to be successful at it). And if you want to do this, you have to make sure the person, and their team, is on board with making that change.

This can be especially problematic if you don't have a culture of the organization being driven by engineering; where becoming a "manager" affords more success (making decisions, getting things done) purely because you're a manager now (because of the political aspects). Removing the people management leadership position then can feel like a demotion.
Distant reading and the blurry edges of genre
I got 4 down votes them saying: "Git doesn't equal github"

My post: It is good to see that a company can accept that there is a better tool, github.

They were WRONG Google is moving to github
https://github.com/google

Lots of repos are hours old thanks down voters.
By a couple of minutes I meant ~60 seconds a side - basically just leave it on long enough to get the level of Maillard browning my guests like. This is one of those things that helps to have all the guests crowd around while you do this as they can then tell you when to take it off the grill. Yum!
Emacs as a Bookmark Manager
> The trackpad support is not as good as in OS X, but still infinitely better than any trackpad I've used on a pure Windows machine.

Does it support precise scrolling (per-pixel instead of per-line?) The trackpads in Windows 8 ultrabooks support this, but I've heard that the Windows drivers for the MBP trackpad don't.
Yup but not a bad move. You're an elusive DevOps now (It's hard to find them!). That's what I would use as a job title. It's a good market for that and you can always go back to being a Web Dev if you want. On our team, we tried to find a sys ops who was interested in doing dev ops to mentor us. None of the Sys ops guys we had made the transition - you're in a great position.
(edited : expanded response)
Implementing an API can still be creative. I wasn't allowed to work on Mono, as I had MS source code access. Just on virtue of having perused MS's source, I couldn't participate. I understand the reasoning, but the end result feels wrong.
I know what you mean. The SystemD controversy motivated me to take a look at the initial version of NetBSD's init rc script, which was nicely simple.
China Stops Censoring the Web–for Three Days, in One City
At the end of the write-up, the author suggests "put[ting] your hands on a decent functional language [such] as OCaml or Haskell."

Racket would be another fine alternative, for those who would like to do command-line scripting in a Lisp but prefer a more robust language (than Emacs Lisp) with excellent support for functional programming patterns:

http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/scripts.html
I should have mentioned here earlier, the original thought with dbus was that nobody would use libdbus directly; KDE would use an API more or less exactly like DCOP and GNOME would use soemthing like gdbus. For that reason, libdbus was lowlevel and flexible in a way that made it annoying to use - convenience API in libdbus would have been bloat.

What actually happened is that the high-level wrappers didn't get written for a long time because libdbus was just good enough that people didn't bother to work on alternatives. So that sucked, but it does seem to have finally been sorted out and libdbus is now on the way out AIUI.
Wanting that is just evidence that chess is no longer a worthwhile game.
Sadly my own chess engine (Tarrasch Toy Engine see www.triplehappy.com) has solved the problem of playing like a 1500 :-)
I think the issue is that there is 1 (or possibly very few) perfect way to play the game, while there are endless ways to play it badly. When we want the computer to play badly we want it to play badly like a human would, so we're playing chess and trying to pass the turing test. When we want the computer to play perfectly we don't care if it seems like a human playing.
Google has had a Github account for a long time now. That doesn't mean they're moving all development over to Github for all Google projects. And the v8 project is moving to Google's Git infrastructure, not Github.
To me that's a bit like arguing that Linux/Windows/OS X should have driven broadband take-up.

What actually happened was that a meta-OS - the web - drove broadband take-up, and broadband providers scrambled to improve the technology to meet demand.

The demand for super-bandwidth mobile services isn't there in anything like the same way. And there's no equivalent meta-OS for mobile.

But... at some point we're going to be moving to non-local storage and non-local processing, and Linux isn't really ideal for that.

My guess is that will happen when computing finally starts moving past concepts that were developed in the late 1960s. AI may well be a driver of a non-local distributed computing which isn't based on the cycles-as-utility or cycles-as-private-resource models we're stuck with now.

Is it too unrealistic to consider the possibility that the web could evolve into a single connected intelligent application that automatically load-balances and distributes cycles and storage across all connected devices?
Yea it was, it was designed for extremely resource constrained environments from the turn of the 90s. 9p is an incredibly efficient wire protocol.
Domesticate Octopi
I'm running a 2014 15" MBP as a Windows machine with bootcamp. It's not bad, but would not have been my first choice (Company issued) My personal beef is the keyboard layout sucks (for a Windows guy). Other than that it's a perfectly capable Windows machine.

Having said that, my first choice is the Dell XPS 15 (http://www.dell.com/au/p/xps-15-9530/pd)

Otherwise the Lenovo Carbon or Yoga Pro 2/3 are also great depending on what you're looking for.
The latter. The admin takes a completely hands-off approach to running the server (I'm not even sure if he plays on it). So the condition of the spawn is purely because many people over the years thought it would be funny to make it as inhospitable as possible.

I guess it's an acquired taste, but there's something fun about trying to survive in such a hostile world. How many game servers have 200+ page comics written about them? http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/
There's a trick to beating good players in simil play.

If a few players use the same openings and get themselves into similar positions it's very hard for the opposing player to keep track of the small differences that accrue.
He's managed to get a patent for it
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=...
I think it plays into people's belief that they'll be able to figure out something nobody else has. It's what Sarah is trying to do, and the way she presents the story is shaped in a manner to make you lean one way one week, then completely reverse course the following week. It's smartly executed.
Well, all cryptography lies in practice, in the sense that there is no proof that P isn't = NP, with a small constant, theoretically. Indeed, public key cryptography might not be theoretically possible at all. Likewise, one-way functions (secure hashes) might simply not exist theoretically.

It is very important to remember that there is really next to no theoretical basis for the existence of cryptography at all. It's completely an applied field.

Likewise, if someone builds a physical architecture that solves prohibitively impractical cryptographic problems easily through a different means (e.g. quantum computing) then if it is cheap, nobody will care about the theoretical strength of the algorithm on classical computers.
I am amazed at the level of erudition in the comments section as well. Shows what a highly literate intellectual audience that part of the world must be. Had this article been printed in the Times, you'd have the usual republicans vs Krugman name calling and none of this scientific minutiae.
No, my complaint is that with more than two email accounts, you can't tell one from another on the menu screen... there's no point in having them displayed that way at all as opposed to just keeping the drop down.
* Create an NFS mount to a directory holding thousands of images. Create another NFS mount with directories and subdirectories holding many files of any type.

* Open Nautilus

* Go to Edit -> Preferences. Click on the Preview tab

* Set Show Thumbnails to "Local Files Only" and "Count Number of Items" to "Local Files Only"

Then click on the NFS mounted directory in Nautilus.

You will not have any fun.

This bug has been sitting in the Nautilus bug tracker for over three years.

A fix would not be rocket science, just rewording what it says in the Preview tab would be a fix. Three years gone by and they can't even reword it. Which is fine, but it doesn't say much for the file manager and its inter-OS operability.