skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This time I am going to wait to see what changes they bring

I'm still happy to give FB a break over this; they've done a lot to improve privacy in recent months and IMO get credit for that. I'm still having a hard time verifying the vast majority of "privacy violations" people seem to be finding; I suspect they don't really exist in the way they are presented. Obviously there are one or two that are a problem (and I hope they address that) such as the information that can no longer be hidden from search.

I've been playing the Facebook privacy game for a long time - and from that perspective most of this current reporting/outrage is either a) people getting on a bandwagon/following the crowd or b) misinformed. Amongst that the smattering of genuine complaints has mostly been lost to the noise. In a few months it will be back to a few of us pressing those issues again....

Bottom line is; the problem is in creating effective controls people understand. They really need to crack that, and if that is what the current fad achieves then great.
If you saw the original Boston Dynamics BigDog Youtube video, should check out the version that researchers here in tokyo have come up with:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5BPrlOVX2o
The original spaghetti code
...or maybe FP is a crutch for mathematicians and purists. You're making a huge mistake: we shouldn't adapt our thinking to computers, we should adapt computers to our thinking and make them easier to operate. According to your logic, writing hexadecimal code is the holy grail of computer programming.
Seeing this comment made me try to answer that, just for fun. For improvements, I know that I would have included a more obvious manual somewhere (I didn't know that you could flip the pieces, rather than rotating them with a space bar, until I read that in a YC comment).

The second question is more interesting to me, because I know regexes better than Turing machine variants. I think I could give them the problem of accepting only balanced, nested "parentheses" with arbitrarily deep nesting or something similar (treating blue as open parentheses and red as close). Though they asked something close to that with the nasty "accept only bots with equal numbers of red and blue symbols" so maybe I'm wrong and I should look for some angle with incomputable functions, like the Busy Beaver.

Or you can just cheat and give the play a board that's too small (or limit them to too few pieces) for the problem to make it unsolvable.

The ability to use yellow and green makes me wonder if there's some way to solve the balanced parentheses problem, though. I quit to do something else before solving the "accept only equal numbers of red and blue" problem (alas, I wished it would let me write to balance the tape, then you could just loop until empty, write red blue and accept).

This would sure be a lot more fun than most programming tests. I had a lot of fun designing things like a "red eater" which took care of the .* in the problem asking you to match .*BB$ and trying to shave parts. I know I could get rid of several more if I had known how to flip them. I just hate seeing something and knowing there ought to be a way to simplify it further.
NISSAN DVD GPS Navigation + 6.2" HD screen + Bluetooth A2DP + ipod + RDS
Ruby on Rails 2.3.7 Released
I'm by no means an expert on the .Net platform, but are these equivalent? You generate ~20GB of garbage, about half of which could comfortably fit in your memory; more importantly, it appears that .Net, in some modes, does garbage collection in a different thread than the one running the program. And it's clear that using a different thread to zero memory is faster...

Also note that I was talking about object creation, which may be a lot heavier than array creation.
Here are some book lists:

The 100 greatest books of all time everyone must read http://bighow.com/news/the-100-greatest-books-of-all-time-ev...

Top 15 Novels About Work http://bighow.com/news/book-list-top-15-novels-about-work
If your non-crummy tools are so bad that C ends up eating your lunch by a factor of 100, I'm not sure that they really are non-crummy.
That outlook actually helped me solve some of these.

Once I respecified the problem as "accept .*BB$" it became a lot easier to visualize. In particular, it showed me that I needed a junction at the end which passes only an empty tape. You can, in fact, code it up by creating a piece that accepts anything (except end of tape!), two pieces that accept blue, followed by one that accepts only the end of tape and wiring them together properly (which I leave as an exercise for the reader; I'd hate to spoil any of the problems too much).
If I quit, Facebook immediately becomes less valuable to my friends. The only value Facebook has to the vast vast majority of its users, is it's ubiquity.
When I was involved in the Unix world I used to see this a lot: someone with 'x years of experience' who knew the 5-10% of the system they work with day to day really well, with no understanding, no interest, and no awareness of the rest of the system.
You're conditioned to right-click on an object coming from an Apple ecosystem? Coming from a mostly PC background, but with an OSX laptop, the total lack of importance given to right-clicking (ctrl-clicking) or context menus is the thing I most associate with the Apple ecosystem.
You can maintain it without any quitting: just think before you post anything.
Hmm, you're right it would probably run a bit faster as a JOIN, I just default to using subqueries by nature.

Re:Theme with massive paragraph - it was based on a magazine wordpress theme and we're yet to edit it down.
Does Your New Initiative Threaten Customers' Freedom?
> offered a statistical analysis of promotion and compensation that indicated a pattern of discrimination against older employees

How could statistics possibly indicate causality?
I'm surprised that she would sue. After all, she must realize that she was treated fairly and that she's going to make it incredibly hard for the next female minority to get hired, who might be qualified and a nice person to boot. Stuff like that tends to linger, even if it is subconscious and against the law.
Terrible blog post: present a series of special cases where OOP is not the best fit => throw OOP away except for class libraries?

Thanks to Paul Graham's language abuse, dead is becoming a meme: "X is dead" = "I don't use X".
I don't think he has to prove causality, it is more that if he manages to sow enough doubt that he was wrongfully terminated by showing that in the statistics he is an outlier that it will bolster his case.
AVI to iPad on Mac
This tutorial talks about to convert AVI files to iPad with AVI to iPad Converter on Mac OS X, and play AVI files on iPad.
After following the anti-planning approach for a long time, with dozens of half-finished pet projects to show for it, it seems approximately as good as procrastination (for me). If I get excited about something and start tapping away at the keyboard, I'm often left with a couple thousand lines of code and the realization that there are some major components that could have been thought out much better. The joy I originally had in creating it takes a major blow when faced with major rewrites (and the thought of all of the wasted time that could have been better spent thinking about it).

Nowadays, I'll let a project incubate in my head for a few days/weeks/months and approach the keyboard with a solid plan in mind and a well reasoned, well designed feature-set/interface.

But if you really don't have time for an incubation period, write your schema out first. This exposes so many design flaws in the beginning while it's still very easy to manipulate. This should be the "contract" you sign with your blood for the vast majority of apps you'll write for the web, and you should be spending a good deal of time thinking about it (for any non-trivial app) then, not later when you're atop a few thousands lines of uselessness.
> Google gave that they couldn't find him any future role in the company was that he was a bad "cultural fit" for the company, which is a lot more vague and questionable-sounding

I don't think it's vague at all: Google has a culture where everyone codes, there are no architecture astronauts, no enterprise crapware, less emphasis on documentation and meetings and even user experience, more on Making Stuff.

I'm not making any judgement call on that, merely saying that it's a culture many people wouldn't fit in to, in particular ex-government employees.
To make sure that those things that you can not change in life (age, race, sex, beauty and so on) are not going to be used to disenfranchise large swaths of the population.
And you are making an equally huge mistake: that thinking in terms of sets, mappings, graphs, combinators, etc doesn't help. It does. And if a programmer is incapable of understanding those concepts, he should learn them.

The fact is, we shouldn't adapt computers to our thinking, nor our thinking to computers. We should adapt both to our problems.
I think the first thing to understand is if you're accepting these small tasks because you have to or because you want to. I found that I would often find every little problem interesting and relevant and would accept working on it.

I soon became overloaded, and I decided that I would have only a certain number of slots open for projects. For example, two projects from this department, two from that and one pet project (my choice).

I would say no to any new projects that didn't fit in a slot. This doesn't work as well when the source of the problem is that you must accept all work pushed on you. In that case, you probably need to talk to your manager.

Think hard about if the problem is your inability to say no to an interesting project.
I'm surprised that she would sue

She may have never heard criticism of her abilities in her entire life, was working for a boss who had nothing but positive feedback for her for an extended period of time, and then was suddenly canned with no warning for being incompetent. Every professor and teacher she's ever known is in unanimous agreement: she's awesome. Clearly, the boss must be racist.
> He seems to be claiming that it was mainly his age

If the reasons he was let go were all typically legitimate reasons but also possibly directly due to age, would that be discrimination?

I can't think of solid examples for programmers, but to use another field: Suppose a firefighter is let go because his age has robbed him of his ability to perform physically. Is this ageist?
Ballmer on Facebook privacy: Zuckerberg one of 'good guys'
It seems that the author doesn't have the real idea what he actually wants to measure?
He just throws some heaps of code and gives some numbers. I haven't seen that he even tried to specify what he wants to achieve. His posts just don't have sense.

Something which is really useful is on:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/

For example:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=go

etc
> My recollection from the design of Java is that such "finality" is necessary to allow the type system to reject code that attempts to override security-sensitive methods: is that not still true of C#?

That's still true. The "feature" I has in mind is that methods in C# are not virtual by default. This is in direct contrast to Java where they are. This interview has a discussion on the motivation behind this (IMO incredibly tiresome) feature: http://www.artima.com/intv/nonvirtual.html.

My view is that the real issue is that inheritance is all too often used when composition is more appropriate, which problem this change does nothing to help.

> What of a language that eschews inheritance entirely, both because it makes reasoning about software more difficult and because the vast majority of programmers cannot use it correctly?

If it only makes the language better for "bad" programmers, I would consider it patronising. It also comes down to the intent of the language designer, by definition.

> "Patronizing" seems to indicate that a designer considered himself smart enough to use a feature, but determined his "subjects" were not. What of designers who recognize their own limitations and remove features they know to be error prone in their own practice of programming? Is that still patronizing, or does it deserve a different descriptor?

I think that's worthy of a different descriptor. A failure to anticipate the needs of programmers who are smarter or more disciplined or whatever - which is what such an omission seems like to me - may be a problem, but I don't see it as patronising.
That saddens me. The law should be based on fact and reason.
Taking the awkwardness out of a Prenup - A Game Theoretic solution
Stallman asks too much from everyone, but this is good. As said George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Someone mentioned the same thing in class. Professor said that during a settlement negotiation, he asked, "Why are you doing this?" and she actually said: "I need the money, and don't know what else I could do." Her and her lawyer offered to settle for something like $6,000 but he refused it on principle and went on to win.

Actually, it was kind of sad. He was really a sweet, kind, nice person, literally no temper at all but gently assertive, very balanced and helpful. The class I was in was a low-ish level technology class and we had quite a diversity of people in there. He helped everyone as much as they needed, assigned intelligent and fun assignments... really just a great guy.
"Do you mean this particular law doesn't need to exist for lawsuits to exist? Because all lawsuits need grounds to bring suit."

Yes, that's what I mean. Eliminating the protected class won't eliminate lawsuits from people who believe that they have been the victim of unfair discrimination, because people who believe they are unfairly fired can still file suits for wrongful termination. They just can't explicitly claim age/gender/religion/whatever as a basis.

If I can provide evidence that Foogle, Inc. fired me without cause, I might possibly have grounds for a case of wrongful termination against them, regardless of my age, gender, etc. But if the law also says that I can't be fired for my age, then it suddenly becomes much more important that I can demonstrate that Foogle, Inc. has a pattern of firing people who reach their Nth birthday.

Basically, eliminating the protected class just makes it harder for people who are legitimately being discriminated against to make their case. It doesn't really deter people who are simply irrationally angry or looking for a cheap payout.

If we imagine a universe where age isn't a protected class, your professor's secretary would cause just as much trouble -- she'd still lose, and she'd still have her day in court while doing losing. Unfortunately, it suddenly becomes possible for Foogle to start firing people en masse at age N, simply by fictioning up a few bad performance reviews. But now nobody can prove it, because age isn't a protected class, and will be ignored by the court.
The memory usage never climbs above 15MB - that's for the whole process, the .NET runtime, code, system DLLs, etc. all in.

With object creation, reuse is far harder whereas with an array, you can just zero it out. In other words, the argument in favour of reuse is even weaker for objects than it is for arrays. I would say that if you have large arrays - large enough to go into .NET's large object heap, at about 70K - you're better off reusing those, because they only get collected during expensive gen2 collections, and they aren't compacted.

As to the fact that the GC can zero memory on a different thread, that's not a problem - it's a benefit, as it's guaranteed correct concurrent zeroing, as opposed to the contortions you'd have to do to reuse. Again, an argument in favour of GC.
It's worth pointing out that, being a civil case, he only need show something to be true on the preponderance of the evidence.
I've seen people mentioning instant personalisation is a privacy problem, but that's mainly people just copying and pasting those statues that do the rounds. Haven't had anyone on my facebook question the external like buttons, apart from the last few days when people discovered the title/ website had massive max name lengths, since fixed.
Yeah, the iPod touch processor has been scaled up slightly differently from that of the iPhone:

iPod Touch
G1: 412 MHz
G2: 533 MHz
G3: 600 MHz, new processor

iPhone
2G: 412 MHz
3G: 412 MHz
3GS: 600 MHz, new proc (I assume), more RAM

From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Touch
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-one-p...
Project Bubble: possible basecamp alternative? Please review.
I started facebook when I got into freshmen college, which was this year. I mainly started to use it as people like to share assignments on there fb accounts(we are not emailed our assignments)
Ironically, I don't think OOP was really meant to be used for business objects. I think inheritance doesn't work very well with objects whose backing store needs to fit into a relational database someplace.

OO really shines with UI programming, where incrementally building up behaviour through inheritance makes a lot of sense.
MurmurHash [1] (which is by the same other as TFA) is one of my favorite ever finds. I use it in conjunction with Google Sparse/Dense Hash Maps [2] (another great find, which is Google's very nicely-designed implementation of C++0x compatible hash table STL structure with great performance and memory usage) in almost all my projects these days.

1: http://sites.google.com/site/murmurhash/
2: http://code.google.com/p/google-sparsehash/
>There is no way for an app to install on your profile without your permission

How I understand the concept of the like button is this:

The like button is an extremely easy version of Facebook connect. When you are logged into Facebook and visit a site with the like button implementation, you have automatically logged in. You do not need to click the like button. (Remember you could once sign in automatically to TechCrunch's commenting system by just visiting).

This way Facebook can monitor the sites you visit and in future can serve you better ads on those websites than Google. (that is how they are a major Google competitor.

The so called apps that were installed without permission was was just a internal tracking tool that was made public. It still exsits but users just don't see it any more.
It's a complicated area, but I think generally the answer is that that's allowed, but with a fairly high bar for the employer to show that what they're testing really is a "bona fide occupational qualification". One of the important cases in the area is Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), where the Supreme Court held that Alabama's height and weight requirements for prison guards, which disproportionately impacted women, were not justified, because there was no evidence that these height and weight cutoffs correlated strongly with prison safety: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dothard_v._Rawlinson
I recently had your feedback on my Invoicing app, well this one is for Project Management. I'd love your thoughts - particularly on the home page. Does it explain the product well enough and is it catch enough to make you want to sign up? We've got nearly 6000 users so far.
You - ΘΗΚΗ ΓΙΑ IPOD TOUCH 2G SWITCHEASY COLORS ΛΕΥΚΟ 310143
Ask HN: How much does this Joel's article hold true?
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I'm working on a startup and the current codebase is 2.5 years old. The original code was built with a lot of assumptions (or future predictions rather); very few of it hold true today. Also, a major goal back then was to just get it out. A lot has changed and it has become a rather hard problem to maintain it. I'm not talking about bug fixes; it's adding new features that is taking at least 2x the time it actually needs. A couple of us (only in out part time and without disrupting the existing code base) are planning to retouch it; rethink the assumptions as it holds today and incorporate best practices. However my manager is pointing me to the article above and says we are at fault here. Have you been in a situation like this? What would your suggestion be?
Are you a domain maniac?
Powerful tools improve productivity because you have to do less work to get the job accomplished. But they have a reverse side: you need to be aware of how they work to use them efficiently, otherwise you'll end up with silly performance problems - e.g. I've seen naive string tokenization code that did substrings, and then deleted the matched substring from the start of the string, all in a loop. By providing the tools, it's easier to misuse them.

When you have fewer tools, on the other hand, you need to think at a lower level and work more directly on the problem. You have a lot more work to do, but the probability that you're misusing the tools is smaller, because you'll be building the tools yourself, manually.
The law is based on fact and reason. Judges are there to interpret the law and apply it to real life situations which are gray instead of black or white.
> functions as values in Mathematics just isn't considered as "normal" outside of fields concerned with the fundamental basis of mathematics.

It seems to be fairly common in linear algebra. The usual way to represent a linear function is as a matrix, and a function on that matrix is a function on a function. You also get fields of polynomials, in which differentiation is a linear operator.
I read a lot of actual traditional books and have never found it a particularly comfortable experience. Holding pages open, turning the pages, trying to find a comfortable position, it's not ideal no matter how much you romanticize the smell or feel or cover design of real books. I've read a few books on the train via an iPhone and found it acceptable.

But what I'd quite like is a a clamp that attaches to the back of my chair or bed headboard and loops over my head to hold an iPad, Kindle, or generic unbranded alternative in position a reasonable distance from my eyes. Then to finish off I want it to flick onto the next page via some ingenious mechanism, maybe a keyword or eye tracking (even something geeky like a bluetooth clicker remote would be good) that doesn't require to me to lift my hands to the device.

I've seen similar in hospitals for TVs (which of course would be a second function for iPad like devices). Has anyone built something like this, either for sale or just jury-rigged for their own use?
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Thanks, that settles the question.

However, browsing interfaces might still affect the statistics, for example, if someone right-clicks a link and selects "copy link location" than pastes it into address bar, it is clearly a "direct access". That must be rare though.
Clickable link:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I think one key point is:

> The old mantra build one to throw away is dangerous when applied to large scale commercial applications.

How big is your application? How many users does it have? Do you already have a good regression test suite?
I think in the short-term wishlists stop you buying things, but, because they persist you end up buying things that you would normally have forgotten about in the longer-term.