skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) "The first half seemed utterly naive (apparently nobody was sexually assaulted in the golden age of the 60s?)"

- But should she be subjected to an investigation for writing a "naive" article? I think not, as surely the freedom of thought includes the freedom to have "wrong" opinions?

(2) "then took a very unwise turn with the recounting of the ongoing court cases."

-Disagree. These cases are in the public record. Why shouldn't she mention them? It's not as if she has sworn confidentiality or she had inside information.

(3) "What particularly struck me was the refusal to believe professors had any power over students"

- I don't think this is an accurate summary at all. You don't have to agree with her opinion, her point was that the new attitudes she's complaining about greatly exaggerate the power of professors over students. A professor has the power to give a student a bad grade or write them a bad recommendation. A student has the power to complain about the professor to the dean/chair and give him/her a bad evaluation. If a student alleges sexual harassment or assault the professor's career could be destroyed even if the charges are not proven. Basically a professor has some power, but not some kind of unlimited power over individual students, which seems to be what is being alleged.

(4) "if students aren't exposed to harassment at university then they won't be prepared for real life."

-Nope. I would phrase it as "If students are overly coddled and swaddled they will not develop psychological coping skills to deal with a real world which is not going to exquisitely cater to their sensitivities".
Just looking ok is not the point. I would prefer a match between how it looks and what it does...
Its not so disturbing when you consider that braces aren't special cased in the C grammar. They group statements so they can be used together where a statement is needed. From the grammar's perspective the "normal" way is without braces. It's just that all the C-alikes have gone a different direction with the way braces are parsed leading everyone to regard the original behavior in C as ugly warts.
You can pretend its not a cynical attempt to mislead a critical segment into recommending your site, though they wouldn't if they knew what it was really like. I'm an HNer. This is personal, so its creepy.
'A single website' that is the largest single fraction of the entire internet traffic, yes. And what's with the 'pseudo' slam?
If France's laws are like Portugal's (which is typical), there's a flaw in your argument.

It is very expensive to fire people, even when it is entirely justified as a measure to save the company. Companies routinely go under because of this effect.

The response is, typically, that you should be prudent when hiring, and allocate the firing cost so you can face dire straits and come out on the other side. However, companies act in a market. Your competitors either don't have the same laws or act imprudently. If you act too conservative, your company fails.

A partial solution, for domestic competition leveling, is mandatory fund provisioning, for worker compensation. It's not perfect, but it mitigates the problem.

Worker protection, albeit necessary, is not free. It's not free for the companies and it's not free for the society. This was an example of the price to pay.
Just goes to show that humans can even mess up "perfect" evidence. How many convictions will get overturned by this, I wonder. A factor of 10 is pretty large, if they're talking about "1 in 180" levels of probability.
I guess linking geniuses like Emmy Noether to the Google logo is also a "noble gift".

It's advertising and manipulating people's semantic networks for fun and profit, nothing else.
I have never used a gift card at starbucks before, but that bill [0] doesn't make any sense to me.

He says he has two cards: One has $15, one has $5.

Card 3203 is billed $14.68 and card 6075 is billed $2.02.

The remaining balance on card 3203 is $0, card 6075 has $5.70 remaining.

If card 3203 had $15 and card 6075 had $5 before he used them, the remaining balance should have been $0.32 and $2.98, respectively...

That's really me guessing, but it could be the $5 was just an example to explain the concept and in fact he used smaller values (e.g. $0.05) to be able to trigger the bug more often without generating too much cash... but he should have explained the bill somehow.

[0] http://sakurity.com/img/sbcheck.jpg
I used to write

return (0);

I.e., with a space. I'm not sure if someone ever told or recommended me to do this, but the reason I did this was consistency with other C statements, because all C statements that take some kind of expression as a parameter (if, for, while) require it to be surrounded by parentheses. So it seemed logical to me to do the same with return. I've stopped doing it now, although some of the old code still lives.

I've seen code by others where there was always a space between the function name and its arguments. That was ugly, and really confused a function call with a statement.
Come on. Netflix is the single largest consumer of the Internet. Any metric you want to name. Consumer interactions being the most important. They beat other video-on-demand services by a large margin. And most of those others have popups (or forced ads injected into the content). And Netflix beats them all. You understand the argument.
I'd take another angle to why I generally look down on "useless jobs," as just another worrying trend.

As is oft cited here, we're rapidly reaching a point where the basic needs of all people could be served by a vast minority of the populous, and there is a wide array of options that can be taken to still ensure everyone can support themselves. One of these options is "useless jobs", build out the job market so that everyone can still work for their pay.

As you say, your goal is to be comfortable in your other space, but in the above trend, the fact that you MUST chose the other space from within a potentially limited set, and then conform to whatever constraints it demands on you, should demonstrate why I think "useless jobs" are a worrying outcome compared to alternatives such as a global minimum wage, such that you can truly chose your other space freely, as well as what you fill the time there with.

To bring this tangent back to the point, if useless jobs become the norm, and we continue a society that puts the emphasis on _jobbing_ and not enabling each person to live their life however they wish, I worry the more Utopian outcome is an impossibility.
The Ghost of JavaScript Future (by Substack)
I wonder what new possibilities for total spying this approach enables.
From the web-site it looks like it is available as a dual-license, GPL3+ and commercial?
Indentation to identify blocks can break down in things like switch statements:

switch( c ) {

case 'A':
simple_stuff();
break;

case 'B': {
int temporary_variable = 0;
complex_stuff( temporary_variable );
}

To me, the advantage of braces on newlines is it makes it extremely easy to tell where blocks start and end---whether you're using your favorite IDE, or reading the code on a blog, or reading the code with "cat". I actually think it's a case where Python has the design advantage on C (since if you do braces-on-newline consistently enough, you end up duplicating python but with superfluous braces added in).
Bring a $100 bill and say it's all you have ;)
Nearly all webmail UIs are written using PHP. Given that 78% of PHP installs include at least one vulnerability [1] it would be good to have a webmail UI written in some other language.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/31/want_to_have_your_se...

Edit: This is not a dig at PHP, I would not want to install it on one of my servers because I do not know what I am doing.
Wait, is this referring to Microsoft's Passport (I know they were support to make it work with Javascript web apps, too, later this year)? Otherwise this is going to get very confusing.
One more thing to consider: given its logically unambiguous nature, Lojban would make a great language for communicating with a computer...
I'm curious - what IS the perfect CMDB software?
He was convicted for it so we don't need to say "allegedly" anymore.
Links are not clickable because it's 2015 and I (wrongly) assume you are capable of plunking 'open office plans productivity' into your search engine of choice.

But to be helpful, http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Open+office+plans+productivity
U.S. citizen Mohamed Soltan freed from Egyptian prison
In my experience, Starbucks is one of the few places which allows transfer of gift card balances or purchases of gift cards with other gift cards.

I can only assume this is because gift cards are intended to behave like cash (when the balance is zero, they have no additional value), but operate under the mechanics of credit/debit cards (asynchronous transactions, network failures/delays, etc.). Debit cards have the feature of going negative with very clear legal liability assigned to the account holder. Gift cards holders are essentially anonymous, so recourse may be more difficult.
Things have improved drastically in the past couple years. Small business insurance rates no longer depend on employee health costs, pre-existing conditions aren't a problem anymore, if you're not covered under an employer you can get a plan through the exchange, and if your income is low the premiums will be subsidized. It's basically moved in the direction of the French and German systems, except with for-profit insurance and without price controls on medical services.
He could, except this quote predates Bitcoin by at least five years. Oldest reference for this page in the wayback machine is in 2003. The quote may be even older than that.
Same experience here.
Servers get ordered, racked, provisioned and left powered on waiting for a sysadmin to make use of them... which quite often doesn't ever happen, because team priorities change over time, people move on/get fired, entities go through reorgs, etc.

They sit there idling and unattended, burning power and disks, until some script kiddie finds whatever default root password was used or how to exploit some random apache/ssh flaw.

At that point the possibilities are endless: bitcoin miners are quite unnoticeable in most environments, but DDOS/spam zombies, proxies, bittorrent seedboxes, botnet C&C, "warez" and http servers serving drive by exploits are fairly common.

Protip: ask your datacenter provider to power your servers down (be it VMs or dedicated gear) after racking them up. Powering them back up when you really need them will only take you a minute and you'll save big on power, bandwith, security and peace of mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justifiable_homicide#Examples_o...

Texas was the first thing to come to my mind : http://nation.time.com/2013/06/13/when-you-can-kill-in-texas...

The laws do seem to allow less after the fact, with good reason. My point was that we clearly allow for people to value money over lives.

When is a robbery over? The stuff never stops being yours, and they never stop running away with it.

A lot of things come into play here, but I'm pretty sure you could still post a reward, 'dead or alive'. I think it's legal to try to catch the robber yourself indefinitely, and defend yourself if threatened in the process.

Our wild west laws are only slightly less savage than what was alleged in this case.
When i initially reported it, it felt like they quickly had me speaking directly with the person that was possibly at fault in order to fix the problem. But at the same time it did feel like they were internally sweeping it under the rug.

I think its more likely that they hid the fact that this happened/was happening and that resulted in this issue resurfacing.
This is more than a weekend's worth of work

I usually think of weekend projects as something done over many weekends - I can't manage much in a single weekend.
I've always wondered about the way predicate words are chosen in Loglan and Lojban, i.e. maximizing a weighted sum of phonemes common to the candidate word and the words in widely spoken natural languages. The only English speakers who would recognize "blanu" as corresponding to "blue" are those who know something about those conlangs, and I bet the same could be said for Chinese speakers and "lan". Esperanto is criticized by some as Eurocentric, but at least some people will recognize the vocabulary.
Yes, it's not 1989 anymore, people shouldn't have to rely on soap opera caricatures to learn what English literature experts think, how smug they are and how they are the natural enemies of physicists and scientists somehow. I am not saying people like that doesn't exist, but I don't think either that the Liberal Studies are trying to fight any kind of war with science.

The funny thing is Isaac Asimov and most of the science fiction writers have their books filled with traditional philosophical problems and literary figures, they just sugar-coat them with enough speculative science and avoid naming the concepts by name to avoid scaring their public.

The article linked is great, but let's not use it to reinforce senseless clichés.
Teamup Calendar
I wish they would get off their butts and wage war against the referral spam problem that has made analytics useless for low traffic sites. The current filter system is not good enough to combat them. They need to provide a special filter with a curated blacklist that automatically removes all past data logged from the spam sites.
Interesting, I stand corrected. That said, to legally carry out the act with a car that might actually hurt someone else (driving it), you need to be both licensed by the government and compliant with a suite of regulation (insurance, etc). So I think the point still stands.
Tech/Dub – Music
I read your articles and could add one myself but fail to find it : a published scientific paper about how smoking is good for your health because it makes you think about your health at some point (basically saying "don't trust everything science says"). I also agree with you that (most) people blindly following science but I don't feel like you are the kind of person I'm caricaturing (which is true for the sake of my description).

You seem to grasp the concept of critical thinking and I believe that's why you would object. To me talking about science implies critical thinking. Somebody having an argument with you about science without acknowledging the certainty of being wrong is not talking about science but pseudo-science. And so you end up discussing with a fanatic, which is not a discussion.

I'm not saying that English Lit experts are everywhere but I feel like they just do not trust "science lovers" to be capable of critical thinking.

edit: It's like you're asking "how to convince science fanatics that they can be wrong" and I'm asking "how to convince English Lit experts that I know science can be wrong but still think it matters"
Everyone on HN should be crowdfunding with www.tilt.com (YC 12).
Use Reward Code: HN10 and get $10 towards any tilt and 0 credit card processing fees.
> It always feels like they are trying to make the last stand of humanitarian values against the dictat of science.

Except for that in reality the legitimacy of science becomes more and more tenuous with each passing year. In the past 40+ years there have been few if any major advances in the scientific process that have seen wide adoption, despite the innumerable problems that have come to light. And not only have there been no major improvements, but things have actually gotten significantly worse thanks to the corporatization and gamification of academia, the increasing use of proprietary technologies and source code, etc.
Would an arp-scan work or checking the arp cache of switches for MAC addresses that weren't tied to an IP address? Presumably the servers attempt[ed] to get an IP address at some point (like broadcasting DHCPdiscover or some such) - wouldn't it keep operating if an IP weren't acquired?
France labour laws are on one extreme. For example the notification period for quitting is 3 months for "cadres" (most software engineers are cadres). In Luxembourg and Australia it is 1 month, in Spain it is 15 days. There is probably a middle ground.

It has an impact on the whole society, because everything is modelled after those lifetime employment usages. If you need to leave a flat, you also need to show a 3 months notice. See the link? Now what happens when you don't have a stable employment? You pay 2,5 month too much. Our society is split between those who succeed to get a lifetime job ("CDI") and those who have an unstable life, entrepreneurs and lowerclass people included. It encourages staying far too long in a company you're not made for, which creates depression, hence France being the 1st consumer of Prozac in the world, the one with most sick leave and the country known for grumpy people.

I've lived in Australia. My flatmate grew up in an orphanage in Thailand. Today he makes $1000 a week as a waiter. He quit to start his studies, at 24. That's when I started to think that we've overvalued job stability in France.
My belief is that the only way to make the perfect CMDB software is for your company to write it itself. Every CMDB system winds up being obliterated into twisted machinations of the original vendor's object model to the point where the vendor can't even help their customer anymore. I've witnessed CMDB implementation projects at least a dozen times and have seen 0 actually succeed at what the customer really wanted to get out of it (because people are sold unicorns and puppies in the ITIL model that no vendor can actually deliver because it's theory ware). Almost all CMDBs or equivalent system of records database has been RDBMS based in my experience on the enterprise IT side. One exception is that Facebook has their own that's not from some random acronym vendor used with clients being pluggable such as from Chef in place of the provided ohai.
Am I missing something, or did you describe every bug bounty program everywhere? Isn't this exactly the definition of a security bug?

Even in your dry analogy, what's the problem? Would you not want people to tell you they found a very easy way to take money out of the register?

Not that it matters; this is text-book, industry standard security bug reporting. He waited with the public disclosure until it was fixed.

(If he didn't; different story. Maybe I misunderstood that part? Was that it?)
Years ago I shut down a start-up, and as part of some business partnership, we had a physical server hosted in some big company's datacenter. They forgot about it, and I didn't have time or incentive to drive over there to fetch one old machine. So it just kept running there for a couple years, at first just continuing to serve my failed company's website, and then doing nothing, other than serving as a personal download proxy for me. That lasted for about 2-3 years until they finally found it and shut it off, so I took it home.
I would imagine once you get used to him and thicken your skin up a bit, it's no big deal.

Hell, a little salty language and telling people they're being idiots when they are being idiots is not a bad thing. The best machinists and millwrights I've worked with were like that, and it was a good thing - you don't have time to ask politely when there are steal beams or a two-ton electric motor swinging towards you.

C can be almost as dangerous :-)
True, but humanitarian values do not need a last stand. So how do you discuss with someone being this radical with reasonable arguments? I don't feel like "you can't" is an answer :/
The problem is that without a linter there's no punishment for missing semicolons.

So really the argument should be that everyone should use a linter.
Been there. Except in my case it was two 8 story office buildings.

Stuff was moved in hastily from an acquired company when there was no room in the server room, hooked up because important (mail server), and subsequently forgotten while departments where shuffled around the building and employees left over a period of many months.

A week after I started the server started having issues. And nobody knew where it was... Finally found it in some storage room.
I'm sure he'd appreciate a memo from Sam Altman about gratuitous negativity.
How about we both draw out our positions more explicitly? I present two scenarios where someone is selling a harmful product to people-- one in which someone is selling a product that US citizens have an unassailable right to in an illegal fashion and one in which someone is selling a product that people have a weaker claim to in a legal fashion. I support jail for the former and not the latter simply because my position is that the peoples' right to have product is irrelevant, it's whether you are selling it legally or not. If you're selling someone harmful in an illegal manner and you do multi-million dollars of business per year you should go to jail for a long time, even if the people have a right to said product.
Show HN: Travelio, realtime suggestions while you travel
Sorry you had such an experience with France. I've left the country too (I'm french).
The Unbundling of Finance
Fundamentally, the problem is that braces are needed at all. Humans are bad at matching them up, so they don't match the humans' intention when indenting. Confusion.

It's all backward. The IDE should SHOW you the blocks somehow (background tone changes etc), and let you edit the blocking explicitely. If they look wrong, you select and hit a key. Now you're in agreement with the compiler.
That's even worse! Now the dialog centers around creepy voyeurism. Google has single-handedly salted the market so nobody can enter it. It will take a decade at least before somebody tries again.
President Obama Weekly Address: Pass the USA Freedom Act
The message being pushed from the very top position of the US federal government. I disagree with him on this issue fairly deeply, but it's interesting to see.
I wonder if innocent men are rotting away in jail that have given up themselves and been given up on. They know they are innocent but I doubt 'the system' will swoop down and fight for them.
Start building up subscriptions. It really depends what you want - I like Roosterteeth and Tom Scott but many people will only like one of them.
Dynamic, Generic Namespaces in Python Are a Pain
A damaged lock needs to be replaced.

If you must have an analogy, I think it's more like walking up to an unattended cash register during business hours and fiddling with it, figuring out how to take $0.10 out of it, and then putting the $0.10 back.

Not clearly harmless (or it wouldn't make so many people object), but the counting of the damages stops at a quite low number.
My 1996 homepage is still online under its original URL. Which likely means the system hosting it is still online. Except the original ISP no longer exists, nor does the ISP that bought the original ISP.

Next year I'm going to find that system on the 20th anniversary of that page.
there's this stretch of road in western Queensland runs straight about 50 clicks. I drove through there once years ago just after a bushfire. horizon to horizon was dead flat. the land was the same color as the road. i remember driving past this single burnt out tree still standing. it was nowhere special.
It's an interesting theory that this was a conspiracy by the banks.

Either way, a lassez faire market naturally forces this type of evolution without proper controls by a governing body. It makes complete sense that profits can be maximized if "consumers" (what the rest of us call people /s) have to continuously pay to use things that they depend on.
The article was regarding an Australian, and Tilt is US only.