skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, yoz! Thanks for the shout-out. That is probably my favorite post of mine on the site (out of 100+ and counting). So wonderfully serendipitous and fun. Everything about that game is a joy.

I was actually looking back into some of the Starlight Lines forum stuff a few months ago when I discovered with dismay that the original URL (starlightlines.com) was down. I was thrilled to figure out you'd managed to resurrect it! (Did you ever see that email I sent you back in September?)

Anyway, the story of that hidden community is so great, I did my level best alerting anyplace that had originally picked up the story for a correction on the new URL so people could know it was still around. Apart from the fine folks at H2G2:

http://h2g2.com/feedback/A388334/conversation/view/F47997/T8...

...I didn't get much success -- including no response from Kotaku UK when I mailed them offering help for their pseudonymous writer on H2G2 who had been asking for leads on the apparently dead forum:

http://h2g2.com/entry/A452125/conversation/view/F55683/T8309...

It's good to see he ended up doing something with the story after all -- though it would be nice if he'd hat-tipped the MeFi thread where he apparently lifted that "sentient tomatoes" quote from verbatim (unless of course that's just a favorite turn-of-phrase of yours). Lately, MeFi needs all the Google juice it can get.

Cheers, and thanks for all the great stories!
Thanks. Handling cookie may have room for improvement. Definitely will look into that!
I have definitely had my Stallman phase, but after seeing some Free As In Freedom™ projects fail spectacularly, I've realized that there are in fact benefits to keeping some things out of the public eye (from a moral point of view).
Macaroons are pretty interesting: https://air.mozilla.org/macaroons-cookies-with-contextual-ca...
The question as phrased can't really be answered. "Freedom" means different things to different people; but I would say that while a manual job that you may consider mindless could be considered freedom to some people, not feeding your family is absolutely not freedom in any sense.

And what people seem to miss is that every task - even the task of raw creation or idea generation - can be considered trivial once you sufficiently understand the process behind it. Any job or skill can be broken down into easily digestible bits, and once that's possible the system can be automated and scaled.

Hell, company generation is the same way. Look at Y Combinator. They've created a system that generates companies in a very automated, predictable fashion. They have an algorithm for making companies successful. It isn't 100% successful (yet) but any self-aware system will improve itself over time as the process is better and better understood.

So while I would obviously prefer to be running Y Combinator than assembling brooms in a factory, I'm not sure you can consider one more valuable or "worthy" based off of whether one is more "free" or not, especially if your definition of freedom is something that can't be automated - aka reduced to an algorithm.
Why was Microsoft Windows Pinball game removed?
Wow, that's really silly. And they wrote the Java code without telling anybody? Maybe they chose Java on purpose to get some maintenance contract from your company.
I've spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about this problem lately and haven't found a good answer. The need for pagination seems to stem from:

1. The desire to limit the size of HTTP responses.
2. The lack of the ability to notify a browser that you're done loading/rendering async content.

Aside from page-flip-metaphor apps like the one posted here, it doesn't seem like a desirable UX pattern.

Have there been recent (or not so recent) developments in either of those problem areas?
Long ago in a previous life, I worked in a factory that made PVC products, including plastic house siding. One of my co-workers got his arm caught in a pinch roller while trying to start a siding line by himself. There was a kill switch on the pinch roller - six feet away and to his left, when his left arm was the one that was caught. Broke every bone in his arm, right up to his collarbone.

He screamed for help, but no one could hear him over the other noisy machinery. Welcome to the land of kill switches.
Working good an Arch, nice 'n' easy.
Tools for Web Performance
This problem is already solved by using LESS, SCSS, Stylus, SASS, or one of the many other CSS preprocessors.

If you need to "compute" any styles, those can do it. Or, if styles need to be changed based on data or input, you can just create new classes and assign them as necessary.

One major benefit (though there are many) of preprocessors over your solution is that IDEs understand those languages and provide autocomplete/error-checking.

As a general rule, you sometimes need to reinvent wheels, but the benefit of reinvention needs to outweigh the collective learning/support of existing solutions.
The green logo is RactiveJS, not React.js
The headline would have been 900% better as "The Soviets took bear guns into space"
Wouldn't U3 be the only most likely to stay the same, though? You could basically consider that rate as the "recently fired/quit" rate. I'd think a "people who have given up on work entirely" rate would be much better.
> If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.
As I work on quite a big directory tree, where most of the repos are in just a few parent directories, I like using the CDPATH variable that is present in at least (oh-my-)zsh and bash(-completion) (IIRC).

That would auto-update when new directories / repos are added later - maybe a useful addition to your tool?
How Sciemce Can Inform Ethics and Champion Sentient Beings
Why Enterprises of Different Sizes Are Adopting ‘Fast Data’ with Apache Spark
Well, I think it's more like saying we should prefer temperature data based on tree rings or ice cores (or, even, old mercury thermometers).

"Prefer" is probably the wrong word, so you certainly have a point. "Accept, with a note that the data isn't ideal" is much better. I'm OK with using less-than-ideal data when ideal data isn't available; but I'm disappointed with the number of reports that fail to mention any limitations of their. It's entirely acceptable to say "we don't have enough data to establish whether this claim is true."
It's nice to see a more detailed technical explanation of this. I've used the story of Knight Capital is part of my pitching for my own startup, which addresses (among other things) consistency between server configurations.

This isn't just a deployment problem. It's a monitoring problem. What mechanism did they have to tell if the servers were out of sync? Manual review is the recommended approach. Seriously? You're going to trust human eyeballs for the thousands of different configuration parameters?

Have computers do what computers do well - like compare complex system configurations to find things that are out of sync. Have humans do what humans do well - deciding what to do when things don't look right.
Accounts that apply these codes typically have the subscription removed when the inevitable chargeback occurs though. I had this happen buying a code off Ebay due to not being in a supported Netflix country. Luckily Paypal was able to refund me.
Internet access: Gordian net
Ugh, OS X pseudo simplicity is the worst. Want to align the dock in a corner? Want to tab through dialog options? There's an arcane terminal command for that. The list goes on, I have these to on top of my head.

At least the first two problems are the exception not the rule.

I want most of my USB-Drives not to be used as a Time Machine, therefore it should be the rule: Drives are not used for Time Machine unless noted otherwise. Since there's a pref pane for it, it wouldn't even need an extra button.

Most user's will not prepare the layout of the files and folders in some fancy way, so just show them arbitrarily, unless otherwise noted. Just hide the option in the "Get Info" dialog.

Drive Indexing options could be hidden in the "Get Info" dialog, but I'd be fine with keeping it enabled by default.
What you are describing is happening and has happened for decades in many countries and at different levels: Governments with failed philosophies buy votes en-masse from various numerically large groups of people by (a) pretending to be aligned with their interests and, (b), gift-giving to that group.

I think it is fair to say this is now happening along the entire American continent, from Argentina to the USA. I know nothing about Canadian politics so I can't comment.

The framework is the same everywhere: Socialist or socialist-leaning ideology coupled with failing policies. If you truly study history from, say, Evita Peron in Argentina to Obama in the USA the parallels are scary. It's almost like they study each other's techniques and replicate them across time and space.

Of course, this makes sense. Politics responds to evolutionary forces. It is easy to see that "survival of the fittest" converged on a solution that swaps favors to the masses for votes. The only thing that matters is the survival of the organism, in this case a politician and the party they are associated with.

Of course, what happens to the masses and the ecosytem within which they live (the country) is of no importance to the organism aiming to survive (politician and party). Again, Argentina is a perfect example of killing the host or the environment in exchange for the survival of the political species. The country goes to hell but the politicians live it up. Same in the US where not one of our populist politicians has to live by the very rules they push on us. For example, Obama and his daughters will never have to worry about healthcare because they exist on a plane far above ours.

Humanity has to come up with a way to prevent political actors from manipulating the masses for their own gains. Easier said than done.
This startup wants to bioengineer faux rhino horn, end illegal poaching trade
Before OSX 10.10.2, apparently there was a "heartbleed" style info leak in spotlight where it "may save unexpected information to an external hard drive", according to http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204244 (CVE-2014-8832). Probably related to this report: https://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002752.html
> Imagine for example you could make $120,000 a year as a programmer, or $200,000 a year doing factory work. Do you think society will produce more programmers or more factory workers?

Say I can make $25k a year as a janitor, or $360k as an anesthesiologist. Is society producing more janitors, or more anesthesiologists?
I was going to type a big response calling out the random anecdotes but then I read;

> All GDP growth in the past 30-40 years is smoke and mirrors.

Which might be the most absurd thing I've ever read. At least it prevented me from typing a more thorough rebuttal though.
Perhaps it's meant to convey that, unlike the story, the system can deliver "A Message From the Emperor".
It's just nonsense that this metadata would be dropped as files scattered across the filesystem, rather than simply held in a single location on the host machine. They're a fragment of the OS, not of each directory.
This is why the internet is one of the greatest things ever to have happened to the world of drugs. Someone who wants access to drugs no longer has to involve themselves with the toxic culture surrounding the physical black market. One can just download Tor, buy some Bitcoin and hop on Evolution to buy virtually any drug without interacting with any personalities beyond sending a PGP encrypted address.

There are still reasons one might end up associating with the drug culture; if one wants to share and discuss their experiences, the easiest way to find psychonaut friends is through the local drug trade.

The other major benefit of online drug trade is that many middlemen are cut out of the equation. With less underground transportation and distribution, there is less violence. Many vendors produce the drugs they sell themselves. A highly reputed psilocybin vendor, TripsWithScience (believably claims to) grow psychedlic mushrooms in his home, using spores he originally collected himself, then extracts psilocybin, packages it up and mails it to the recipient.

No middlemen means no violence. I don't believe I'll live to see the categorical legalization of drugs, but for now I'm happy with this.
probably those that are under-performing can't actually do the jobs required in the high performing areas?
But, in theory, shareholders still can fire the CEO, the new CEO can change any appointments, the company can fall out of compliance and still retain all assets and IP, correct? So it's more of a pledge with some safe-stops that makes it more robust than just a PR release, but it doesn't really legally guarantee the company will never use factories/data in a way that goes against their declared principles, then?
Practical Example of Bit Wise Operations
Docker Ecosystem: An Introduction to Common Components
January Top – List of Best E-Commerce Articles
As a Kubuntu user and dedicated nerd, I fully agree. But as somebody who has spent some time trying to make user interfaces understandable to people, I'm a little more pragmatic and can see that pseudo simplicity still yields good results.

The Time Machine thing is pure marketing, of course. It drives conversions. That's its own brand of terrible, but even THEN you could argue that pushing people to do backups in whatever way isn't necessarily pure evil.
for me it just adds all the code in all the files and displays it in a small font.. something wrong in my repo?
Buying fair trade supports an alternative over the status quo.
How Crossy Road made $1M from video ads
It has never actually taken longer than a few seconds for us to deliver bitcoin, despite the wording we use there.
Because it's directly comparable with the rest of the worked and is the measure we've used historically - both of which have value. If others decide U6 is the most important figure, it's reported in literally the same publication as the U3 figure and they can reference it accordingly.
Mitochondrial diseases can be shitty, shitty things - I have multiple siblings with untreatable and debilitating effects from it.

I didn't know they could even do this (technically), so this news gave me tears of joy.

I am lucky on two counts, to be male (can't pass it on) and also not (yet) had any symptoms myself. It must be horrible for any female who has to decide whether having kids is worth passing those risks on to their offspring.
The current system is not the best of all possible worlds. There are better alternatives (eg. fair trade), ignoring them is just laziness.
A good set of basic, controversy-free guidelines for clean java code style
How much sleep your child really needs, by age group
I set this up on my servers, and not a single Android ssh client was able to connect, or even read the keys generated on another device.

This seriously affects my confidence in the security of Android.
"If support for a new device can't be merged into older releases because it relies on ABI/API breaking changes, do you want to be told that you won't be able to use your shiny new hardware in a FreeBSD release for the next five years?"

Yes.

As a business user of FreeBSD, with shareholders and a board of directors, etc., we make very conservative hardware decisions and we try to amortize our investments over as long a period as is practically possible.

I've never thought this argument was that convincing, especially given the propensity to see FreeBSD as a server OS. The fancy things are never ready in the first release they go into anyway, so it's not like we gain much, from a practical standpoint.
"my flora" - such a nice way to put it. I'm going to use that next time I need to talk my deuces.
We built our fraud mitigation system from the ground up. It's rather complicated, but it boils down to properly matching the user on our site against the information available about the real cardholder.
It's not a single acquiring bank to underwrote our merchant account -- we work with several.
Why would you need a GIL if you don't have threads in the first place?
Fixed in build 3069.
Lending Club
That's quite a Turn in ones career.
Nadella has worked on the cloud computing at Microsoft. Microsoft is betting big time on the cloud. Although MS never publicly admits, the OS business for the end user is slowly fading away with the tablets, smart phones taking over and Browser becoming the new OS.

You can see this by looking at their Office 365 strategy (iOS, Android release, online version push). Making Windows 10 free to 8 users, removing licensing fees for windows phones, making Visual Studio available for free. Making the ASP.NET vNext to run on Linux.

Instead, MS sees the growth in Azure. Whether they use Linux or Windows servers, MS can make money off of the enterprise/startup segment. Whether or not it is a sustainable strategy in the long run, we will see. But in the short term, at least for the "consumer" market, MS is giving up on Windows and it is moving its focus to Azure and the software that runs on top of Azure (Office, Sharepoint, Dev Services, XBox, Bing, etc).

The marketing strategy behind this is also interesting. Things are still labeled "Windows" to give the illusion that the "Windows" the end user gets on their new laptop is somehow "related" to the Windows in the cloud (Azure). Interesting strategy to make the "Windows" brand live for a little more at least..
its actually a huge product on Silk Road, you can buy a "lifetime account" for $10 or something like that.
Increasing the text size past 150% hangs Firefox (on OS X).

Specifically, the cursor turned into a beach ball and the whole browser became unresponsive and stayed that way until I killed Firefox about a minute later.
In this instance: Desktop, graphics. This from a hobby point of view, though! Which means I have very little time to achieve anything and occasionally don't touch the code in weeks. I've come to write code that is a) trifty b) readable c) works on compile d) leverages type system for composable code that has a specific "correct" way to do things.

So I can return to my code, which I've completely forgotten how it works, see that it compiles, read it through, and continue working. Noticeably: I do not need to care about the tooling because it just works. I don't get a shiteload of weird exceptions when I run my code (looking at you, Clojure - yes, I'm a noob) and since the Pythonic and mutable nature of F# allows me to write code in the way I enjoy the most it feels like a glove. There are a few oddities occasionally and some bits are a bit more verbose than in other languages (Clojures collections spoil any other language) but the overall experience is that I can focus only on my code. For me, it's a pain free computational substrate, and free as in beer now that Visual Studio community edition is out.

My progress is really slow but always worthwhile.

If you are interested I found Jon Harrops "Visual F# 2010 for Technical Computing" really good practical introduction, Don Syme et. alls "Expert F#" a good reference book on writing general stuff in the .Net ecosystem with F#, Petricek's "Real-World Functional Programming" a very good introduction to various application patterns and Sestoft's "Programming Language Concepts" a great book and online reference on writing interpreters and compilers (http://www.itu.dk/people/sestoft/plc/).

*At work I use C++ on MS stack.
Its hard to really give a meaningful answer without seeing the email. You could check if the attacker was sloppy, and allowed information to leak in the email headers, but its quite likely that your brother was emailed by another victim.

Its much more important right now to assess the impact, and to contain any breaches that have occurred. If your brother and his colleagues were infected by malware upon clicking the link, their IP may be in jeopardy.
How to think about Medium.com and Images
The article seems to be written from the perspective where we somehow weren't born from the same evolutionary processes as ants.
Then they make it so it pulls over gracefully before it leaves the zone in which they could.
Trickle down economics = financialization of capital. Those who influence the policy are beneficiaries of the financialization of capital: think of grads from elite law schools and b shools!! If there is no financialization of capital, these grads from elite law/b schools wont get fat bonus.
By computing values I meant defining styles based on runtime variables (browser size, localStorage data, …). CSS pre-processors can't do that.
Does this impact SoftLayer in any way?
An Expansive Camera in Nethack is the character '(', not a letter 'c'.

A letter 'c' is a cockatrice or a pyrolisk; those are both quite dangerous so I suggest you learn to recognize them for your own good.
I think you're thinking more locally than this, but on the global scale there's GiveDirectly: https://www.givedirectly.org/
The Strand in NYC, Powell's in Portland, and a number of more local ones at a smaller scale. New/used bookstores definitely aren't dead, they just survive in areas with more bookish populations (the entire city of Portland would riot for days if Powell's ever threatened to close).

I like the "treat it as a cultural institution and charge admission" solution, if that's what it takes to avoid closing. A few dollars would totally be worth it for an hour-long leisurely browse.
Which would mean that those meta data is only available on this host and not anywhere.

The problem is the short coming of those file systems not to allow to store arbitrary meta data to any file.
Prometheus: An open-source service monitoring system and time series database
Real Answers. Real People.
Calling all Experts, we need YOU!
A few weeks back I asked Scott Gu if there were any plans for Visual Studio on OSX/Linux and the answer was no. He mentioned they're focusing on Visual Studio Online, though I don't know if that means some sort of online IDE.
The number floated around for XP continued support is $200 per machine per year. Redhat, which is one of the few companies that supports a Linux distro for as long as Microsoft supports their products, charges $49/year for the equivalent of Windows Update, and doesn't have any information whatsoever on extended support. So, for the average customer which wants their desktops to have the same lifespan as XP in order to minimize training and other associated costs, ending up with a year or two of Extended Support while you finish your transition is still cheaper than any of the Linux providers.
You're proposing revolution as a resolution? Really? Revolution is not a means of governance.
IBM Verse signup
Great link. Thanks for posting.
Location: Volgograd, Russia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (visa required)

Technologies: C#, .NET, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC/Web Api, RESTful Services, SQL, Entity Framework, PostgreSQL, multi-threading, network programming, unit testing (Moq, xUnit.net), Android

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x35z2p60dvlkx15/denis_molokanov_cv...

Email: molokanov [dot] denis [at] gmail.com

I'm a professional software developer with a passion for building great applications, with an in depth knowledge of OOP, OOD, S.O.L.I.D. principles and design patterns.
I have the ability to understand and transform complex business requirements into software, ensuring applications are delivered on time and to specification, performance optimized and maintainable.
I'm a highly motivated individual who is always learning, able to work to tight deadlines. Someone who encourages learning and the sharing of ideas and is always open to new ways of working.
I was re-plastering the walls of my house in Berkeley, and I found a bottle of "Shinola"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinola Now I can say that I know shit from Shinola.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/know_shit_from_Shinola