skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh, I don't think it needs that much over-explanation. We also commonly call the ROK "South Korea", and the ROC "Taiwan". They're both allies, but we still typically don't use their actual names in anything but formal settings. Going back to the Cold War, we used geographical terms for both East Germany and West Germany, which weren't in either of their names. I don't think this was out of a desire to dehumanize Germans, but rather because referring to a divided country as if it were not divided, using their official names "Federal Republic of Germany" and "German Democratic Republic" (which both claimed to be The Real Germany), is unwieldy bureaucratese.

(It's also not U.S.- or English-specific; you do the same thing in all these cases in Danish. Except for formal documents, it's Nordkorea and Sydkorea, not Den Demokratiske Folkerepublik Korea / DDFK or Republikken Korea / RK.)
I wonder how many private (i.e., non-governmental) groups in the U.S. use this practice, either for business purposes (e.g., Yelp and Amazon reviews, Twitter posts and responses, or popular and influential forums (such as HN!)), or political purposes.

On one hand, it's the 'Big Lie': People naturally doubt such deception is occurring until they see a smoking gun, and even then many deny it.

On the other, it is such an obvious, inexpensive way to drive public opinion, I'd be shocked if it wasn't widely used. Even paying U.S. minimum wage, you probably are paying under 50 cents/post. That's 10,000 comments in your favor for < $5K -- without knowing data on the influence of such things, it seems cost-effective compared to advertising. Imagine a local politician or a super-PAC doing it before an election in just one locality.

Also interesting: Many people I know think they can detect astroturfing when they see it. I'm sure that's true sometimes, but the astroturfers have more experience and are more sophisticated in their craft than we are -- they do it all day, every day. They know what makes something look credible, and you can see that discussed in the article.

EDIT: I just found this:

Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy by Edward T. Walker

Although 'grassroots' conjures up images of independent citizen organizing, much mass participation today is sponsored by elite consultants working for corporations and powerful interest groups. This book pulls back the curtain to reveal a lucrative industry of consulting firms that incentivize public activism as a marketable service. Edward Walker illustrates how, spurred by the post-sixties advocacy explosion and rising business political engagement, elite consultants have deployed new technologies to commercialize mass participation. Using evidence from interviews, surveys and public records, Grassroots for Hire paints a detailed portrait of these consultants and their clients. Today, Fortune 500 firms hire them to counter-mobilize against regulation, protest or controversy. Ironically, some advocacy groups now outsource organizing to them. Walker also finds that consultants are reshaping both participation and policymaking, but unethical 'astroturf' strategies are often ineffective. This pathbreaking book calls for a rethinking of interactions between corporations, advocacy groups, and elites in politics.

http://www.amazon.com/Grassroots-Hire-Consultants-American-D...
I fully agree with you that the MagSafe utility patent is a paper tiger, but unfortunately in this case Apple still hold a design patent on the general MagSafe connector shape[0]. So anyone is free to make their own magnetic power connectors, it just can't have five pins in a line that matches the exact sizes that Apple has chosen.

[0] http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/12/apple-wi...
I remember when this first hit slashdot back in 1999. It's still a damn funny analogy. 8)
Elementor lets you test Protractor selectors from your browser and IDE
> But the speed and thoroughness [...] is certainly exceptional

So? In a day, a modern celebrity can influence people with a "speed and thoroughness" that would be totally unthinkable to a Jewish celebrity 2000+ years ago.

... But that's due to technology, not due to the differences between Kim Kardashian and Jesus.

In 500 years, the bloody Annexation of Sol is going to be exceptionally speedy and thorough too, because it's easier to be speedy and thorough when you've got warp-drives and teleporters.
there was a (German) talk at 31C3 about a proof of concept such a propaganda bot:

http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6184_-_de_-_...
> dirt poor totalitarian state

North Korea isn't dirt poor. All the wealth is concentrated at the top, and in the military-spending though.
Revolutionary implant enables broken spinal cord to function again
So refreshing to see the promise of some simple non-tech products here. I spend 12 hours a day interfacing with technology and it’s exhausting. I love tech and I hate it. Smart watches might be the norm in a couple of years, but I question if more tech is always the answer. Sure an app might be able to accomplish to the same ends, but we have those tools already and still don’t accomplish our daily goals. The simplicity of the Flip Band matches the simplicity of the goal - just do it, everyday.
Life-Changing, Money Making Books to Grab This Year
> The real world evidence is that if you got rid of guns in an attempt to stop suicides, the strong majority of those who want to commit suicide would find another method.

What does "real world" evidence mean? Because real world evidence from England (paracetamol pack sizes; switch to natural gas from coal gas; removing coproxamol from general use) shows that many people do not find another method.
This is great news for a capture everything NSA. Maybe light up every web cam and every microphone on the planet. What I would do is form a backdoor deal with HD manufacturers so that I got a generation ahead of regular consumer tech. The NSA would need to keep HD shipments from manufacturers off their books.

With its ~20 Billion dollar budget, the NSA could easily hoover (ha) up a large percentage of the entire hard drive market. It could spend 5% of its budget to capture %5 of the HD stream.
Related- maybe an option:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8857632
How to Explore God's Secrets to Success
At first it sounded like a better version of online Costco, which sounds awesome since Costco's selection is limited. But after reading how it really works I'm not so sure this will be that competitive vs. Amazon. There's a dependency on other merchants it sounds like?
Neat - I've been working on behavior change apps for years now, so love being reminded that most of your life (your user experience) is outside your little glowing rectangle.

Backed!

That said, I think Steve Jobs would have made the wearable most appropriate for the situation, which may have been (and I guess will be) technological. The point is appropriate tech for the right situation, not some idea that technology is bad (rubber is a technology too).
Have you considered hiring a contractor tonmaintain the code?

If its generating a profit, maybe its worth it?
The original source title ("Why we're quitting Stripe") certainly an unusual application of a link bait title.

With the link bait removed, this article serves zero purpose as the price announcement was made with the original announcement.
Why I love and believe in virtual reality
> What would they post?

Anything that swayed public opinion. For one example posting negative things regarding the Edward Snowden controversy. There were people calling him a "traitor" who "got people killed" with zero post history.

As I said, the evidence that the USG does this is not strong, although there have been reports that discuss doing it (and methods), and the USG almost certainly do have strong influence over the popular media (e.g. evening news, newspapers, etc) and have since the cold war (when newspapers would have a CIA employee in every newsroom, providing "feedback" on certain stories and some claim pushing US puff pieces).
> a whistleblower have disclosed it

Like how the NSA shenanigans got the whistle blown on them before they got very far?
About half of suicides are done via gun, and about half of households have access to a gun.

There's nothing "dramatic" about reducing your chance of dying via suicide by being in the second half. I don't want to say it's zero, because I'm sure someone's life is spared by not having a gun around when the urge to suicide pops up.
Will Intel build any NUCs with these chips? I was thinking of buying one with the current generation and would rather wait if they have any plans.
Engine Yard Sponsors Bundler
Pretty sure it's already legal in Alaska.

http://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Marijuana_Legalization,_Ballot...
my understanding is that the method call is statically dispatched, and the dispatch is tweaked per module.

So, if I pass a String to your api and you invoke method X it will invoke the one redefined in your module, while outside it stays the same (more like scala implicits than ruby's open classes).

EDIT:

to clarify how I understand this: the authors have basically decided that the module is the element of behavior specialization, and method calls are basically static functions with syntax sugar, and a class is only a data container with some default implementations for the functions.
Muslim scholars on Charlie Hebdo attack
Good thoughts!

I trust you have money to put behind them?
Existing HSMs claim to support ECC so I'd hope they can support Bitcoin. I wonder which HSM CoinKite uses.
It never explicitly states that the "this size or bigger" refers to its population, it could be area.
Wireless charging is pretty lame

I've had a Lumia 928 for about 19 months now and I have to disagree. I haven't plugged the phone in - to anything - since I bought it. I find just thunking the phone down onto the Qi charger much more convenient than fiddling with cables. Some day we'll look back on wires in general and laugh at how primitive we were.
I deserve to get downvoted for venting. Nothing else to say really.
I'm not sure which Muslamic country you're thinking about but Zionists had http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool which I personally think was a very clever and convenient tool to organize ideological driven people (given the time it was introduced 2006)

And I recall reading a couple of years ago about a software that enabled a person to control several user accounts on one site or different sites. And I think the US military or some other US agency actively used it.
What killed Smalltalk was the $10,000/seat licenses. There was very limited scope for anyone to "kick the tyres". But it's OK, we have C++14 now.

Don't get me wrong I would love to use Smalltalk in anger. But that ship has sailed. Fight the battles you can win.
The resurgence of the hoax shows that some of our FB friends are gullible and don't understand TOS, copyrights, etc. This is obvious and we probably knew who would fall for it because we used to send Snopes links to them.

I think it also shows a deeper unease with the pervasive and fast moving technology and surveillance in their lives. Rather than learning what rights they have, what protection the law does and does give them and what they might be able to do about it, they're happy to imitate what they see others doing in a cargo cultish sort of way.

I posted a snarky rewrite [1] of the hoax to my FB feed and got predictable responses. First was a predictable 'its a hoax' from someone that stopped reading at the first sentence. A few lulz and one person who wanted to persist in the disbelief "What if the hoax is a hoax?".

[1] http://pastebin.com/m3nkq98N
This is exactly why Republicans want to fight it. The number of Republicans that subscribe to and believe in the opinions of The Economist are rather small.
Show HN: Micrologic – A tiny, literate implementation of miniKanren/core.logic
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8499452
I'm under the impression that Apple is the only company with decent software support for "high pixel density." Is that not the case?
Native code produced by ART is going to have a larger footprint than Dalvik bytecode, which is very compact compared to Java bytecode, never mind native code. The inconsistent, or even regressed performance is, if not predictable at least not a surprise since the system might be having to reap whole runtime instances more often to free up memory for what are now larger heaps, using ART. Especially on low end devices with less RAM. ART will work best in devices with plentiful RAM.
Anyone know where I can buy type C connectors? They seem to be unobtanium at the moment.
Shades of the original iMac, which ditched everything in favour of just USB.
I see people being taken by the actual hoax weekly. Maybe your friends just have better critical thinking skills than mine.
JavaScript for the moon
Out of 79 valid style properties (not counting vendor prefixes) the author found 372 in use. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The real world evidence in the comment you replied to, from the paragraph that you selected your quote from.

1. About half of US households have access to gun, implying half do not. Suicide-by-gun is about half the total suicide rate. With the assumption that people kill themselves with a gun if it's available, the no-gun-in-household suicide rate is very similar to the gun-in-household suicide rate.

2. The fact that the US is within about 10% of most other first-world countries in terms of suicide rate. Unless you want to argue that something especially good about the US's mental health system such that only Luxembourg ought be in front of it.

If the US turned into Canada (meaning: essentially no guns and a suicide rate 0.92 of the US) then more than 80% of gun suicides would find another way.
What does iOS have to do with the popularity of one version of Android over another?
Jobs was far too obsessed with simplifying high-technology to have considered a non-tech physical product. But in reducing a product and its purpose to the simplest form, I think he would have agreed that high-tech is not always the answer.

“I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the [Eichler-style homes]. “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-lo...
There are plenty of ways of being critical of something without being inflammatory. In your earlier post, which I assume is this one[0], from the banned account called "wastebook", you refer to everyone who uses Facebook as "narcissistic", imply that they're liars, and state they have no "real friends". That's a massively wide brushstroke to use given the size of Facebook's userbase, and doesn't lead to constructive discussion.

The worst part is that it undermines your own point, which is a shame, because when put more sensibly it could actually be reasonable: your argument, once you strip out the vitriol, is that social media is reducing the ability of modern people to nurture deep interpersonal relationships. That's the kind of opinion that can lead to a good discussion, with points to be made on either side, but it's impossible to have that discussion if you start it by pre-emptively insulting everyone who would disagree with you.

I can absolutely understand why the mods would choose to immediately ban you, given that it was an insulting comment, the first comment on a new account, and an account which, based on the username, appears to be crafted for the sole purpose of disseminating those insults. All that is enough to ban you, and you don't have to run to the flimsy assertion that your comments on Hacker News are going to be affecting Facebook's stock prices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8852896

Edit: For the record, the comment that was deleted was a comment from a throwaway account "warning" people that anyone who would post anything negative about Facebook would get their account hellbanned because "pg and other YCombinator investors have plenty of facebook stock". By the time I hit the "submit" button it had already been deleted. Pardon me for falling into the temptation of feeding the troll, but I felt I could make an interesting point.
Steve Jobs is smiling from wherever. The more things removed the better for him. Personally I never have owned a laptop and still love my mouse, keyboard and three monitors.
Yay another break through that's supposed to revolutionize computing. I'm still waiting for my memsistor instantly on memory.
Only problem I've seen is that the thunderbolt hubs cost over $200, plus the cost of the cable. And even then they only have a few ports.
Saw it this week from an Australian friend.

It went through a few of the same circle a year or so back too.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the vast majority have a fixed entertainment budget.

But even assuming it's true, piracy would still hurt individual companies or even entire industries. Industries you can't pirate so easily would see a disproportionate share of the spending.

DRM would still be very important. People would pirate the stuff that is easy to pirate, and buy the DRM stuff.
> Of course, there's also the fact that because all these values are now monads, you can only interact with them through layers of flatMaps

I can easily (and without using any monad specific operations, bind/"flatMap" or otherwise) write a function that interacts with values wrapped in a Maybe monad.

isJust :: Maybe a -> Bool
isJust (Just _) = True
isJust (Nothing) = False

Of course, I can use monadic operations with any type that is a member of the Monad typeclass, but that doesn't preclude having other alternatives.
Such a simple yet beautiful idea. Motivate yourself to start changing your small habits first so that they become second nature, and once they are built in to your muscle memory, you can start building the next habit that will move you closer to your goal. I just ordered a bunch of them and will give them to my friends as gifts. I hope everyone can see the beauty in this as much as I do.
Yeah. People love to ignore even recent history.

We had evidence that the NSA program was going on since 2003 and in 2005 anyone who was paying attention knew that they had hooks into major telephone hubs and under-sea cables with most of the major carriers (and there were already several whistleblowers). We also knew they were building huge data centres.

But many people ignored it because "the US Government would never do such a thing!" It literally took Edward Snowdon to spell it out to these people before they would believe, but if your head wasn't buried in the sand nothing in the Snowden leaks should have been a shock or surprise (except maybe the fiber intercepts between private company's data centres, that wasn't known).

I think people will naively pretend that the US Government has no influence over popular media OR social media until it is spelt out to them in plain English from internal memos. However we've already seen enough leaks to know SOMETHING is going on, we just don't know the scale (kind of like the 2003 version of the NSA scandal, we aren't at the 2005 level of knowledge yet).
Injustice Gods Amon Us Hack
On the other hand, if you download a console game and play it on your console you don't have to worry that it's bundled with keyloggers or enrolling you in a botnet or whatever.
Most people don't need wires. In a normal density neighborhood, wireless on the pole would serve most people's needs. I am absolutely in favor of the last mile being owned by the people and ISPs competing for services and bandwidth. That also means that cross town traffic would be extremely low cost (free or a couple bucks a month).
This is a very valid point and I would like to see it backed or refuted by sales data. Of course, it's very difficult to speculate how much sales were lost due to piracy or how much was gained due to the countermeasures. But comparing several games with roughly similar total sales over a long period vs. the sales by the time a crack to come out could give a nice data point to start with. If there's a strong decline in sales per day when the crack comes out, that should be a clear indicator that piracy is hurting sales (but I find that hard to believe).

Judging by the article, there was a lot of serious software engineering resources put to this crack protection system. It takes thousands or tens of thousands of sales to pay back the time spent. This money and effort could have been spent on making the product better in a way that is directly visible to the customer. How many sales could have that bought?

But things have changed since the days this game (and article) came out. Ubiquitous Internet connectivity is now on consoles too. Games get (more) patches after they are released (well they are also more buggy on release day). The downside is not being able to play when your connection goes down (or the servers go down) but this has become somewhat acceptable (albeit it's a nuisance).

It has become a lot easier to buy games online and a lot more difficult to pirate them. This is what ultimately made me stop pirating games.
I want the most appropriate results for my search text, not me.

It's a human language question, not an FMRI.
I assume he means in comparison to PCs, where 100% of users already have a "jailbroken" platform.
FCC Chair: Strong Net-Neutrality Rules Are Coming, and Soon
Soylent Really Green: Meal-Replacement Startup Raising at $100M Valuation
MRSA is due to the mecA gene, which is integrated into the S. Aureus genome. It's not plasmid-mediated resistance, which means that it's less likely to disappear from bacterial populations, even in the absence of selective pressure:

http://www.eurekaselect.com/68849/article
This is what I call gamification.
We have some contacts at Aicas, and we've used both the original RTSJ in the past as well as evaluating Jamaica. Myself and a colleague recently attended JTRES and spoke to Dr. Hunt about where Aicas fell short for our specific use case, and in the very near term it won't be usable for us. We're looking in to re-evaluating it around summertime.
Is Apple about to buy the fitness tracking app Endomondo?
over 40% of Amazon sales are from their 3rd party marketplace which relies on third party merchants. If those merchants were allowed to sell without paying Amazon 15% commissions and without competing directly with Amazon's first party sales, you would imagine they could become even more competitive on price. there is no reason Jet will not be consistently lower than Amazon on price especially since they take on no infrastructure costs.
http://www.techspot.com/news/59328-intel-updates-nuc-lineup-...
Intel's entire product line will be refreshed with Broadwell... eventually.
I wonder if the teams at NASA, working on rocket science says "it's not rocket science, you know"
Also the makers of magsafe are possibly ditching it for usb 3.1 if the latest macbook air rumors are true.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/01/06/macbook-air-12-inch-redesign/
Save It in Pocket. Read It Later