skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stand corrected. :)

Yeah, I would've mentioned something about the penny arcade article at least. I don't remember seeing anything about Notch or Minecraft in general discussion etc. until the comic went live. For that matter, I'd be very interested in seeing a graph of Minecraft's earnings from the early days, I imagine the spike was insane.

Minor edit: Yeah I would've mentioned something about how the marketing he did reached a self-sustaining cycle. Where suddenly the big spin about minecraft wasn't just that it was a good indie game, but an unusually successful good indie game.
No, when you call the cops you have to file a complaint against the person you've detained and then the legal system takes over from there. You don't get to determine guilt.

And it's a problem especially since a large chunk of the money does not go to the retailer but to some other party who has a large incentive to get you to settle.
Several of your comments have been breaking the Hacker News guidelines. Please follow them when commenting on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
POSIX shell command language specification
To me the word wiki refers either to the original wiki at c2.com[1] by Ward Cunningham or the kind of organically grown community around a user editable website.

Do not let the word wiki in its name and the content being provided by users through a wiki engine fool you, wikipedia is not a wiki (for a variety of reasons) but this is a common misconception.

Let's just say that if openstreetmap had been called wikistreetmap and used a wiki engine, it would still be "a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license." and not a wiki.

So yes using wiki as a shorthand to refer to wikipedia is not only confusing but also wrong.

[1] : http://c2.com/cgi/wiki the original wiki

-edit-
meatball[2] is a wiki, consumerium[3] is a wiki
everything2[4] is not a wiki[5] and everything2 not being wikipedia[6] doesn't make wikipedia a wiki.

[2]: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/
[3]: http://develop.consumerium.org/wiki/Main_Page
[4]: http://www.everything2.com/
[5]: http://everything2.com/title/wiki
[6]: http://www.everything2.com/title/Everything2%20is%20not%20Wi...
Most people I know who are moral vegetarians do not demand that the rest of the world be as well. They simply object to eating the flesh of animals themselves, or (for the vegans) eating any products derived from animals which did not consent.

You do also realize that another solution for unsustainable levels of population growth is to curb population growth, by better access to and encouragement to use birth control, right?
Your suspicion is correct.
The people that paid up were paying to see the end of it, not to get interviewed afterwards. Of course they would stay the course and still want to make it go away.

Going on the record to say they felt coerced would be counter to that.
I think the point is that the shop detective is a witness and here they are collecting bribes.
But the accused isn't bribing the retailer, since the money goes to someone else (CEC).

EDIT: yes, downvoters, as I point out just below, I had missed the part where retailers get paid.
Not all the money goes to the retailer, but some of it does.

> Retailers can collect a cut of CEC’s $320 fee each time they present an offender with the option of signing up for the program—a form of restitution, said Caffaro, which usually ends up being around $40 per case.
Doubtful. If the parent poster is worried about privacy and security, he wants to configure it so as to always read emails as plain text without ever loading images.
The people alleged to be shoplifters might have to sign a kind of NDA as a part of this settlement...
How is this not extortion and blackmail?

Among other things a legal threat may do the following: Constitute extortion, blackmail, or some other crime or tort involving improper threats of harm: for example, it is considered unethical, and in some cases a crime, to threaten to report criminal conduct to the police unless a settlement is reached.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_threat#Effect_of_legal_t...

Hilariously enough, Googling "blackmail threatening to report crime" and an HN post is on the first page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856066

Maybe thucydides would like to chime in here as well?
There is also http://bellard.org/tcc/
> You don't get to determine guilt.

But this deal does not involve determining guilt either (in any legal sense), they are merely signing an obligation to take a course.
CEC does have an incentive to get you to settle, but since they don't pay the security guards, how do they get to determine guilt or push the accused into settling?
And when you call the cops on an innocent person, you are in trouble as well. This means that the "loss prevention" person as well as the company have incentives to not call the police on the wrong people. With this scheme, not so much.
Why not $500 or $5000 for everybody that walks into the store, or cops...

Because nearly no one would pay and they'd alienate regular customers.

We have long abolished the idea that law enforcement should only be carried out by government agents. Most western countries have more private security employees than police officers.

If this idea was ever seriously implemented in the first place. For nearly the entire history of Europe law was predominantly private.
A JavaScript framework on every table – Allen Pike
Not sure about the UK, but most Europeans circuits are rated and protected for 16 amps, not 13. That's ~3.5kW at 220V.
The problem comes when groupies want to make rock&roll and steal the scene from actual rockers.
They have also signed admissions of guilt, which makes them very vulnerable.
They aren't, since they don't get the money. How is it a bribe?

EDIT: someone else pointed out that retailers do get a cut, I had missed that part.
Oh, I missed that. Yeah, that's fucked up.
So is this going into Unicode 8.0? :p
That wall sockets are typically in places that won't get wet and kettles are.
It wasn't clear, but it's not compile time I'm talking about, but runtime efficiency.
Rails API authentication
No, they have to admit to being guilty. That's in the first paragraph of the article.
The example has text overflowing to the right, but there's no scroll mechanism. Seems like a problem..
Oh, so they will pay $320 but not $500?

Why not, let's try price elasticity on this and maximize the take.
It was removed from Meta. If there are archives, perhaps my user id can link back? Are the deleted messages purged? My user id from the message: user568866

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...
How to write a CV that will get you hired. (Not only for Perl developers.)
$40 of the bribe goes to the retailer:

Retailers can collect a cut of CEC’s $320 fee each time they present an offender with the option of signing up for the program—a form of restitution, said Caffaro, which usually ends up being around $40 per case.
It says, right at the top of the article, that you have to sign an admission of guilt before you can sign up and pay the money.

You can bet that if the people then struggle with paying for the course, CEC will threaten to present this admission to the cops.
At least people ought to know how common language features tends to be compiled. Understanding that can have a huge impact on how you write code.
Maybe it's just an issue of scale, but there are plenty of concrete cases where people speak out against coercion (either by law enforcement of private entities, like banks).

I agree the system can be abused, but I don't think it's unreasonable to want to know how widespread the abuse is. I think the author failed to provide that.

Saying that, it's now clear to me that CEC is also failing in this respect. What system do they have in place to make sure people aren't being coerced? The hands-off approach is rather convenient to not having to be accountable.
These topics are subtle and the current fashions among some social classes in some regions of the world cannot be considered as something more than mere fashions.

For example, that "obvious and easily observable health benefits of being vegan" are related to the avoidance of processed foods and heavily unbalanced diet, rather than avoidance of "animal flesh" or dairy products themselves. This is just the confirmation bias and similar factors at play.

Those, who have studied human physiology, not just cellular metabolism, which is also important, could tell that the problem is too complex to be dealt with by silly slogans like "avoid red meat". There are many subtle ratios involved, not just an ability of a particular enzymes to convert a particular molecular structure into molecules involved in the metabolism and support of the homeostasis, but the ratios among these processes. The balance is what is important. In other words, "substituting the protein sources", is not that simple as it seems.

There is no scientifically proven reasons to avoid dairy products, except for individual cases of lactose intolerance, while there is a consensus that the food industry is the cause of the problem to which veganism seemed to be a solution.

Tribal eating habits is a quite interesting topic, btw.

As for birth control, this is quite another topic, which, perhaps, cannot be discussed in this context. For some members of so-called "urban-middle-class" in some region of the world the policies of forced birth control are acceptable, while in other societies there are quite different reasons about how many children should a family have and why. And, of course, it is not for some "vegans" to decide what other people in other regions of the world should do.
They won't pay at all. Why would they?

Imagine you went shopping (not shop-lifting) and a store employee approached you with a "pay $300 or we will call the cops" proposition? What would be your response? Substantially different than "knock yourself out"?
And, in case the cache goes when Google next indexes, here's screenshot of the cache:

http://imgur.com/JLRc3tY
Because Australia, by necessity, has been run by corporations and companies and non-state actors since its inception, and its current government is extremely pro-business in its desire to build the national infrastructure, exploit the massive resource treasure of the land, and construct a 'next generation' society built on principles its learned from other failures through contemporary history. Australia influenced Marx, it influenced Stalin, and during the period of the modern era has provided corporate elite with an industrial playground in which policies can be tested, adjusted and improved. The Australian people are very eager, culturally, to play that role.
I asked the creator Rui about the name previously, he said there is no reason, just that other letters and numbers were taken.
The language in this article is positively Orwellian.

Asian Americans are learning to deal with diversity in the changing landscape of college admissions

Where diversity means, explicitly, the bureaucracy which enforces academia's racial discrimination.

Complaints about bias in college admissions have persisted since at least the 1920s -- this is a newpsaper formulation which they invariably use to take no stance on opinionated controversies that are not conveniently verifiable or falsifiable, like "Republicans feel that they're treated poorly by the media."

But here's the followup to that: "... , when a Harvard University president tried to cap the number of Jewish students."

Shouldn't this sentence read "American universities have engaged in formal racial discrimination against disfavored minority groups since at least the 1920s, when a Harvard University president successfully implemented a formal quota limiting the number of Jewish students." Because that is a historical fact. It happened.

Another historical #()%')#(%ing fact is that Asian Americans have the weird crazy notion that American universities discriminate against them because the universities have formal policies which spell this out and because when challenged on it they have written words defending those policies on amici briefs to the Supreme Court.
How anyone could consider the second screenshot of gedit more functional than the first is beyond me, but that is probably why I'm on Xfce and not OS X.
Consulting would be perfect except when the lights go out you don't own anything.
Sending affluent students to volunteer in poor neighbourhoods to get them into college is disgusting.
You just told a vegetarian, who is tending towards veganism, to use blood instead of butter. Or did you mean his own blood? (which I guess would be okay for some vegans)
Never a dull moment
I found a similar solution few weeks back which is beautiful and scrolls horizontally.

Believe it is vanilla JS.

http://cheeaun.github.io/life/
Too bad that you don't like libertarianism, because Satoshi Nakamoto (you might have heard of him) expressed all kinds of libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideas.
UK is not Scandinavia or France. Effective taxation on personal income is on similar levels as US.

Contractors have a different set of rules from regular employees but they end up paying more or less the same tax (often less, if they have a smart setup -- corporation tax is lower than income tax); there are other disparities (it's harder to get loans/mortgages etc) but not tax afaik.
Basically any system which prosecutes crime is going to be biased against poor people, if for no reason other than that they are the ones most commonly stealing things. Poverty is correlated with criminal activity, which is an issue that goes beyond how stores deal with shoplifters.
Previously I've seen similar tests done with oatmeal and sugar. Put oatmeal on plate and then sprinkle sugar on top. The purpose of the oatmeal is to insulate. The sugar should get brown on those places where the microwaves hit.
The moderation works based on votes one one of a few pre-canned reasons from several different users. If enough users vote to close, the pre-canned response that the most voted for is what is listed. That means that it doesn't always exactly match the reason that the question was really closed, but it means that it's possible to give an approximate rationale for the close that was performed by several people, not a single person.

I have answered a lot of questions on StackOverflow. One of the worst type of questions is the "please, write this code for me" question. There are frequently lazy or incompetent programmers who just ask for code to do their job, along with students who are asking people to help them cheat on their homework. So many people on SO are very quick to downvote and close any such questions.

Now, there's a grey area. Asking how to do one specific task which is a small component of a larger program is different enough than asking someone to deliver a completed program to you that it's tolerated. Asking something like "how do I use this one facility in a language" is different than asking "please write this tool for me."

There's also just the fickleness of the crowd. Any site which is based on voting, like StackOverflow, Reddit, HN, and so on, can have some questions upvoted and some downvoted due to sheer bad luck, different sets of people looking at different sets of questions, and so on. Trying to expect that a large group will act in a coherent manner, when only a small subset of that group ever even sees any given question (and with strong bias, as different people follow different tags), is just going to set you up for disappointment.

> nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that.

Actually, take a look at melling's later comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126537

> Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming.

Yep, sounds like he was just asking someone else to do a job for him, he wasn't interested in learning elisp.
That document which you sign presumably stays confidential between the retailer and you (i.e. a perspective employer won't see it).

The article also states that:

If someone started to take the course and paid for it—if they change their mind and they want to get their day in court, we’ll refund their money and put the case back in the retailer’s hands. They’ve got multiple opportunities to step back from this.

So I'm not sure how the two of those square.

I'm not vouching for this sort of practice (and it's probably been abused) - but it may in fact be preferable for a dumb young teenager/adult, to take an online course, than to have theft on their criminal record (that would probably make it pretty hard to find employment, even at a crappy job).
I just think Notch did a lot of things right overall. God, I remember that weekend.

I remember thinking that it was nice for once dealing with a company (or an individual) that seemed to care about the players. I was so used to game software/network bugs being badly handled.

Notch just always came off as a 'good guy Greg' of sorts, simply because he respected his users. Heck, even in the recent Molyneux interview on RPS Notch's I almost want to call it 'sportsmanship' is briefly mentioned. ("He didn’t take anyone’s money before making it with promises he didn’t keep.")

I think that more than most Notch's imprint is all over the current Indie Renaissance. The unprecedented success of Minecraft really shattered that ceiling.

More than that I really respect him for walking away from Microsoft and the monolith that Minecraft is now in order to build more games. I think it is incredibly brave (although I imagine there was more to his leaving than was publicly disclosed).
It is a consequence of how templates work and compatibility with C toolchain as a way to get C++ adopted in the early days.

As such you also get into header only libraries for anything template related in the real-world programming.

Maybe if C++17 does get modules, eventually header-only and pimpl might be a thing of legacy code only.

However even if it does happen, it depends on the final design of modules and developers willing to wait around 4 more years for it[0], instead of switching to something else.

[0] No typo, time for approval plus compiler adoption
C# will soon have string interpolation. The release date is, I think, still some time later in 2015. it's just the compiler's syntactic sugar around string.Format() but yeah, it looks nice.
* How do I loop over an Emacs buffer and process each line?

* How do I split a string in Elisp?

* How do I construct output to an Emacs buffer?

All were answered in a little over a dozen lines of Elisp. Small, well-defined, pieces of code are a great way to learn.
Of course it could, but it would be stupid. Why bother with mining, if they don't want anyone else to be able to do it? The point of mining is distributed consensus. You don't need a crazy algorithm to reach consensus with yourself.
Custom stylesheet for #IPython/#Jupyter notebooks – Nicer typography
Thanks.

> If I may highlight, though, your sample is completely flawed:

I would respectfully disagree. :)

> The close vote queue's backlog is such that most bad questions remain open and therefor don't ever get a chance to be deleted in the first place unless (as you've noted) a moderator randomly runs into them months later.

A question could be deleted even if it was not closed earlier. Closed Question is just "one way" for a question to be deleted (Refer Figure 1). In fact, only 14.38% of the questions which were deleted were marked as 'Closed' (Refer Table 6). Your intuition about "moderator random runs" was however found to be true. In case, you are suggesting that most 'closed' questions should be considered as future 'deleted' that is a call IMO would not like to make. In any case, we found that deleted questions are more poor in quality than closed questions (Refer Section 4.5 Sub section "Quality Pyramid"). In that light, it would make sense to treat them as separate entities.

TL;DR - Deleted questions are beyond repair but Closed questions could be patched up

> A problem experienced by SO is one-off accounts: users that get question banned end up coming back for more with a new account, and leave the abandonned ones unmaintained. Where a normal user may end up deleting their downvoted questions, an abandonned account's user will not.

This may be true but it does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the dataset sample. It simply means that the problem is more challenging :)

> Put another way, your sample would be a heck of a lot larger if everything that should likely get deleted would be.

Since all closed questions do not get deleted, this may not necessarily be true. But, since you suggested closed questions, we had a prequel to our deleted questions paper which was about analysis and prediction of closed questions [0, 1]. You might like that as well!

[0] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19882021/pdf/cosn-2013.p...

[1] http://cosn.acm.org/2013/files/Session7/Session7Paper4.pdf
This program is inherently discriminatory against people of low socio-economic status. The article clearly states that less than 2% actually qualified for a full ride, not to mention offenders from low socio-economic status are known to be less aware, or less willing to utilize these types of aid. This is seen from all sorts of offender rehabilitation programs and social aid programs. This will only lead the impoverished to be further marginalized.

Think of it this way, the man in Florida who was arrested 258 times by corrupt police for "trespassing" at his own place of work would not qualify for said program for no reason other than he was an impoverished minority, and was therefore more likely to be targeted by police and less likely to fight fraudulent charges.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2512374/Florida-poli...
Demo @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iXI9X62g8
On-die GaAs LED matrix made by hand (1969)
Criminal records of teenagers are sealed by default in most jurisdictions and the slate gets wiped clean when they turn 18 or whatever the local age of majority is.
Actually, for a certain amount, I would pay to avoid having to deal with the waste of time and the stress that comes from that situation. And I can see myself being willing to pay quite a bit more if I was part of a group that is perceived as more prone to shoplifting (teenager, poor or non-white).

Of course, I would then denounce them to everyone I could, from the cops to regulators to newspapers, but if I was actually a member of those groups, how would you rate the probability that I would be believed?
5 Nazi Plans That Prove They Were Dumber Than You Think
> How is that ridiculously low?

Compared with consulting rates and salaries in specialized niches (SAP etc), 45k for experienced and competent developers is way too low.
:( a black bar would have been fine...
This link was found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/2xhofi/1969_to...
I agree with you. However, the problem is that we can't consider something as a true positive (for a paper) based on gut or intuition. We have to rely on some sort of ground truth and this is the best sanitized sample we could get.
It's the opposite. CEC does not do anything to prevent coercion.
Keynote Does Material Design (VIDEO)
The answer was 15 lines of very educational code that would have benefited anyone learning elisp.
In addition to this obvious point is the fact that most people who shoplift something do it because they can't afford to buy it.

How does charging $320 fix that underlying problem? If anything, it makes it worse.
Fixed in python:

http://bugs.python.org/issue23515
I'm skeptical of the total loss quoted. If a stock drops from 2B to 0.3B market cap, it doesn't necessarily mean that investors lost 1.7B in the pump and dump. For that to happen 100% of the shares would have had to have traded hands. The remaining investors would have been there for the ride up as well as the ride back down.
what you mean by success then?, course not money nor stuff accomplished.