skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think sometimes what's "readable" to one person isn't to another. The more you hit a coding convention, the more readable it becomes (as with anything). So noted. Move along. There are bigger fish to fry.
Iphone 3GS camera freeze, 1 yr unresolved
This does not respond to the issue raised in the article.

In all of jlongster's examples, the result of the '&&' operator is being used. So, someone reading the code can mentally consider the '&&'s to be logical operators.

However, in the article's examples, the result was not being used at all. So, the '&&' was being used not as a 'logical operator' but as a 'conditional operator', which is a non-intuitive use.

Also, '&&' and '||' are not Boolean operators -- they are logical operators, where order matters for short-circuiting.
Google is the industry leader at monetizing search

Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information".

There is tremendous power in information. Not so much in your own, but on the correlation of your data to everyone else's; the collective statistics about anything is where the power lies.

In gmail, google reading my email tells them to sell me product x and we think that's the end of it. But there is so much more available in terms of how the aggregate masses behave with regards to product x and its correlated points.

This extends right into file storage. Yes I am saying that Google will "read" your data. Even better, I'm saying that Amazon more than likely is already doing this.

They're doing it not because they give a damn about you, but because they want the data points that come from the analysis of many separate instances of unrelated bits and bytes. That analysis is worth a fortune. It's a modern day gold rush.

This makes perfect sense for Google.
Me too. But if the goal was to shorten "if(foo()) { bar(); }, then I could just leave the {} braces out instead of making it "foo() && bar()".
I guess there's a mix but I like their compilations. IMO regular viewing of large galleries of designs can only lead to improvement (even if it's "what not to do"), and they've done the assembly work for me.
Amazon is the industry leader at moving product.

They built an infrastructure to scale their site and made it publicly available when they realized that people would pay for it.

This is what good businesses do, Google is no different.
Because if every lecture was that way, then that style would be the norm, and therefore almost by definition you probably wouldn't be engaged, just as you aren't engaged to the norm now, and seek out unique and interesting—novel things.
This is the most worst piece of a bad article:
"Rates of autism in California have increased seven-fold since 1990, a recent study found. Because genetics do not change that quickly, scientists suspect that chemical pollutants are probably playing a role. But there have been few studies attempting to pinpoint which chemicals, or combination of chemicals."

How could they not mention that the diagnostic criteria for autism changed over that time period? In addition to it getting slapped on shy kids, it's become a socially acceptable word for what used to be called mental retardation.
Anyone else tickled pink by the line "...like someone from the future and/or Japan?"
From Twitter and Facebook To Boxee
well actually I think this is the right direction for them, they lost a lot of time trying to catch up in things were they can't win, like buzz or alike.

Apart from the business perspective, at least this is one thing where they can be strong, and able to match the expectation of users.

Also I can't see how this is different from Amazon, business side: they got an infrastructure in order to run their other business. But there is no point in using this just internally, if this can be provided as an high quality service. Looks sane to me.
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Yeah, it's not that political tactics have gotten dirtier, it's just that distribution has gotten easier.
I just started using Hotmail's new comment authoring system.

Sent from Hotmail Commenter 1.5.4 (TM)! Where do you want Windows 7 Service Pack 3 Hotfix 362354 to take you today!?
The dark matter of programmers
Not sure I understand what you are getting at - what exactly has been justified by the "ticking time bomb" experiment? I am not arguing for bad science.

I am also not using the ticking time bomb as a general example to support torture - I was just challenging the original posters assumption that his morals were unchangeable.

Nevertheless it is nonsense to refuse to weigh lives against each other. For example, in big building projects, there is presumably an inherent risk that innocent people will die in accidents during the building process. Yet the decision is often made to build (perhaps build a hospital?). Or take streets - thousands of people die in road accidents every year (and probably many more are killed by exhaust fumes), but apparently society has decided their lives are worth sacrificing. If the decision wasn't conscious, I'd argue it would be an improvement if the decision were made consciously.

Also, nuclear weapons are a real problem. They don't go away by simply not thinking about them. Frankly it might be a good thing that there are other people than feminists thinking about it.

Lastly, I think morals are just a poor workaround for having no sound theory for why a certain kind of behavior is beneficial. The more morals can be replaced by reason, the better for society, in my opinion.

Morals may have a good reputation, but in some other countries people get stoned to death for immoral behavior. Since morals have no scientific foundation, at times we might be ashamed about our own behavior a couple of years later, when understanding improves.
Well, you can talk to him and make it clear you're only in if you get a significant piece of the action. He's not likely to find anyone good on other terms, and in the discussion you should be able to figure out if you want to work with him at all.
Could not agree more. Video encoding is still damn expensive. We're using encoding.com and although they have great customer support, we're still paying roughly $1/video to encode. 5% of these videos will account for 95% of the views.

Why pay $1 to encode an unpopular video then $0.001 for the bandwidth?

Encoding is the only piece of our video model that currently doesn't scale directly.
For what it's worth, I've often seen code like jlongster's example, but never seen code like the OP's example.
Sad, but true. And this explains the state of the Linux desktop today: copied from Microsoft instead of inspired by Apple.
LifeLock CEO has identity stolen 13 times
I really like the UI, it seems to be very simple and user friendly.

It would be great if the translators were required to uncover information such as education and how old they are. It would also be great if you could filter out based on age and education. But maybe this isn't an issue if you have enough data and a good enough rating system...?

Anyhow, good luck, seems like a solid product.
I know, it's awful. I almost didn't submit it because of that. I looked around for a print link, even though I hate it when people submit those here, because that was just so bad.

Shame on LA Times really. I'm most definitely not one to begrudge an institution their profits, but this just feels like a bad business decision to me.
You'd exaggerate the problem at hand too if you were pushing some strange variant of the language criticized. Any programmer experienced with C-style languages recognizes logical constructs with && and || immediately.

If

function (x) {
x = x || someDefaultValue;

for setting non-falsy default argument values isn't a JavaScript idiom, I don't know what is.
JavaScript: the module pattern (in a nusthell)
"the expression evaluates to true if both return True, but then why is the result thrown out"

Actually, the result is not thrown out: the && operator produces the value of its first operand if the first operand is falsy, otherwise it produces the value of the second operand.

For what it's worth, there's also a procedural reading of "foo() && bar()" along the lines of "fill out this form AND win a prize!".
You make a good point: the wars we are fighting right now are very social and personal in nature, when you get down to the units at the sharp end of the spear.

The military has done some interesting things, e.g. for tracking down Sadam's location Facebook wasn't an option so they had to build the social graph themselves (1/2 :-).
Perhaps you could build something that plugged into Scribd then? They are gearing up to be the defacto HTML5 'embed anything' vendor for the web.

Building a comment and revision tracking system on top of it that is very easy to use could be a great way to 'start' your startup before moving to a standalone system? :)
I read somewhere that Spotify is saving money by paying virtually no royalties.
I dabble but I'm currently working on two different full-time projects, so no time for anything new :)

Forgot to add - I think duggmirror had javascript in place to automatically parse the incoming referrer URL and route to the proper link on the site. It might be worth trying to digg up some of their old code if it still exists.
my personal favorite is:

function f(p1, p2, p3){
p2 || ( p2 = "default);
}

and i have a buddy that likes to do "poor man's unless":

if(something && other_thing || third_thing); else{
}

which helps you from having to figure out the logical inversion or have the ! to track down, but is a little weird
Cash unacceptable for iPad purchase
I thought it was funny.

I think the point of this place is to share and discuss the ways to make businesses. Since Max declines to actually tell us what he does, I get the impression he is engaging for other reasons. I guess it's the ego boost, or something.
Why exactly, though? And can you suggest a practical solution that does not involve banning query correlation entirely (I don't think anyone is opposed to the idea of showing "Fred Astaire" and "Ginger Rogers" as related because many people search for both of them)
It’s worth mentioning that the underlying concept is Marginal Utility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
> Flash may have killed Safari but OSX keeps working as if nothing happened. That alone should say something about the OS.

Sure does: Keep the UI out of the kernel :)
I didn't read it (I don't have an iPhone, and I would carry a wallet even if I did), but when I read the title of this submission, I imagined a box that compressed your iPhone into the shape of a credit card.

Then I looked at the name of the site it linked too..
using && as a conditional operator is a common rubyism
Pesticides tied to ADHD in children in U.S. study
Disney aims their brand towards family and kid-friendly audiences. Apple doesn't.

There is no pink iPhone with mouse ears. There is no "Hello Kitty" special edition.
As a roboticist here's my 2p worth.

$15K is on the pricey side, but for some industrial inspection tasks I can imagine this being a cost which can be justified. For just meeting folks in the office I'm not sure that many businesses are going to go for this. For casual use the cost is going to need to be lower, and from a hardware point of view there's no reason why the cost can't go much lower.

My biggest beef with this robot though is its mechanical design. There's no good reason that I can see why it has to be balancing on two wheels. As a technology the balancing system is fine, but it doesn't appear to be fail safe. If the robot suffers a failure, the most common of which will be battery failure, it should fail in a safe position. With a balancing robot if there is a failure it's just going to fall over and crash into stuff, generating a hazard and liability issues. Depending on the environment in which the robot is deployed, uncontrolled toppling could have very serious consequences (for example, starting a fire).
Sorry, sloppy copy-editing on my part.
Similarly- it's idiomatic in bash scripting and very common (execute the first command and the second if the first one succeeds). I think it's funny that he naively assumes that because it's unfamiliar to him it must be the less-clear way to do it.
I use Disqus on my personal blog for comments. On one of my more popular posts (I got just over 100 comments the first day, so nothing crazy), the comments would disappear after a few hours. If I logged into Disqus, I could still see every comment and they all said they were "approved" and posted. But you'd load the blog post and nothing older than 3 hours would show up.

Wouldn't you know, that post ended up experiencing the Reddit effect, and more comments came pouring in. I tried to contact Disqus, but all I got was a ticket number. Meanwhile, the Reddit users had already started having a field day with, "Steve censors his readers and and deletes comments! We don't like his blog anymore."

Disqus was very slow and unhelpful in resolving the bug, even as I frantically updated the ticket with more and more debugging info and speculation as to what the problem could possibly be. In fact, to this day they've still never fixed the bug or closed out the ticket. Technically, they closed the tickets, but never resolved them (I guess that means, "we got this guy to stop bugging us about this issue... CASE CLOSED").

I ended up having to log into my disqus.com account, copy and paste the comments into an HTML file, then upload the file to my blog and link to it at the bottom of the post.

I understand they're providing a free service and thus have little to no accountability. But when you create a service that asks users to entrust their readers' voices and reputations to you, you should make an honest effort to live up to that responsibility.

[EDIT: Disqus is now helping me to resolve the problem. Better late than never! :-) ]
I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I would love to see some sort of 'submitted' or 'updated' feedback indicator when editing your comment.

I clicked edit, typed in my changes, and clicked submit. The page didn't really update so I wasn't sure if my edit even worked. I clicked submit again just for good measure.
Thanks,

This is my 10th design iteration so I'm glad you like it!
I wrote 'thrown out' because the statement is "A && B;" -- the result is unused due to the terminating semicolon.
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Everything you need to know about Unicorn... except what on Earth is Unicorn! A one-line summary wouldn't have gone amiss.
If it has only been 13 times, he's lucky. Don't go challenging criminals to screw you over and giving them a crucial piece of information.

Got what he deserved, especiall yconsidering he was fined for deceptive advertising because of crappy security.
This is perhaps the most salient observation in the entire thread.

Free-market libertarians have an ideological imperative to deny any causality between activity in the pursuit of profit and environmental catastrophes.

It's no surprise that a framework based almost entirely on individual property rights is unable to protect that which is impossible to own, to say nothing of the incorrectness of treating land as partitionable property when we know the ecosystem to be a globally-connected process.

By claiming to champion rationalism, their pretenses shine through; when the scientific method reveals the impracticality of their philosophy, they attack science itself.

You know, maybe we need a less-biased source of scientific funding — how about Exxon Mobil? I'm sure they'd have enough to pay for some real independent research. Oh, actually, it looks like they've been pretty busy already:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ExxonMobil_fundin...
I was disappointed that the wakemate posts got killed because they touch upon this question, so yes, that is what inspired this post. It turns out that the wakemate thread is the least interesting one here. I'm overall very pleased with the comments.

You're very right about the fail whale. Although not 100% successful in changing the emotion associated with downtime from frustration to amusement, it went an amazingly long way.
i much prefer x || (x = someDefaultValue) because it doesn't require backtracking. by that i mean, when i read x = x || somedefaultValue, i am thinking x = "okay, we are in an assignment) and then i see x || and then i have to adjust and think "oh, well, this is a conditional so now i have to think about that situation."

with x || (x = someDefaultValue), what you read is how it is evaluated. if x is true, the rhs is never evaluated. with the above, the assignment happens either way.
First, I think some of this is just a 'the way we're wired' thing. I picked up the 'reading fast' habit when I was in a program that had me reading hundreds of pages of literature a week with the need to be able to discuss the texts at both a detail-oriented, "What does this line mean?" and a broad-scope, "What is the project of this text?" scale. Many people in my class had painstaking notes: I was able to build up an internal model nearly always. But maybe that's just me.

Second, I think another big component was my involvement with academic competitive debate. This required learning how to process a lot of information, both verbal and written, as quickly as possible, and maintaining an internal map of how various 'nodes' of argumentation interrelated. Having to then organize that into extemporaneous speeches puts it into practice.

Anyway, I don't have a good 'route to get here' because I didn't really catalog the transformation. A few things I do, though. First, I read paragraphs at a time (I also speak in paragraphs at a time: most people speak in sentence fragments at a time). I do this by tracking two points every 2-3 lines: one about 25% of the way in, the other about 75% of the way in. For a long time early on, I was reading with my index finger and pinkie finger touching the page tracing down as I read. I know people talk about "reading down the middle" but that's never really worked for me, but the 'double bounce' does. YMMV. I don't trace now because my hands just get in the way.

Second, I learned to stop "saying" what I was reading. Now, for whatever reason I was never one of those people who said the words out loud while they read. But I was 'saying' them in my head and then translating them. I don't know how to express this clearly: I learned to 'listen' to my eyes, I guess, and I sortof mentally hang out in the 'what does this mean?' zone. So it's still being processed at the word/clause level, but it's 'preprocessed'. I think part of this is because I'm constantly asking "what's going on?" in the text, so there's always a context. The times that doesn't work well, though, is in more rapid dialog. I'll lose track of who is saying what. I also have a tendency to skip names (I'm bad with names in general) and so it becomes, say, "K-lady" instead of "Kahlan". (In my defense, Goodkind ends up making all his characters 'generic good' or 'generic bad' anyway.)

Anyway, hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions: thinking about what I'm doing when I read isn't something I practice much. One thing I learned in high school was to not read where I sleep. I later learned the body gets 'confused' which sortof makes sense to me. I tend to read sitting up with the book at nearly eye level (not in my lap). I also read in the tub a lot (hope that's not TMI).
Car Control Systems Vulnerable to Hacking
Yes, I admit that I added the curly braces unnecessarily. However, jsLint will throw a fit if you omit them, so there's an argument to be made that always putting your conditionals in curly braces is a best practice. Certainly, both styles are common in JavaScript, and they'll come out of the minifier the same way in the end.
My favorite feature (from the FAQ):

Is it bullet-proof? bomb-proof? flame-proof?

No. But robots are replaceable -- people aren't. We think one of the most valuable services a robot can perform is to get blown up instead of its operator.
Unfortunately, the defaults stink. 1.2 remedies this for error messages at least.

as_p and co. should include some class describing the field type in the outer <p> tag so that a developer can style the label and error messages in a way specific to the field type.
Tell HN lawyers: Google.org recruiting a whole legal department
Ask HN: successful, transparent bootstrappers?
Hey HN,

I'm currently digging into case studies on how to do startups in the bootstrapping way; and so I turn to the nice HN community: what other blogs fits into the criteria?

Definitions:

successful: $1k/month at minimum

transparent: blog describing the internal business process of creating the startup

bootstrapper: no external investment

The ones I know of:

http://www.balsamiq.com/blog -balsamiq mockups

http://www.kalzumeus.com/ -patrick -bingo card creator (and others)

http://pluggio.com/blog/ -Pluggio (was: tweetminer)

Who else would fit into this criteria?
SAT prep company stops claiming 255-point boost
This goes to show how crafty identity thieves really are -- and how stupid it is to let them get any bit of private data. If they can steal his identity, why not yours? He has staked his reputation on LifeLock's services, and lost. Maybe this will knock some sense into the share-all generation.
Would you still consider investing in new B2B startups that have shown traction with sales?
They've already developed the vast majority of the infrastructure needed for this product in the course of working on their own projects. Why not start selling it? It's pure gravy for them, and it eventually means even greater economies of scale for innovations in power consumption, horizontal scalability, etc.
Despicable behavior by the GOP here. I wish the Dems would HTFU (pun intended) and stand up to this nonsense. This kind of chicanery should not be unpunished, but it will be.
The ring around the head evokes the hat-wearing look of a 1940's businessman; was this the intention of the designer?
Sounds like the dot com business model all over again.
Exactly why people have a right to be up in arms about Facebook changing privacy policies without allowing users to opt-in voluntarily.

Identity theft is a serious issue, most young techies haven't been a victim simply because time and risk haven't converged. It can impact your life for years, making it extremely difficult to get a mortgage, car loan, or even land a job in some cases.
There is one way to deal with it: to expose them.

Blog, tweet and publish, for all you can, the names of those who mutilated the law, the way they did it and what the consequences of their acts are.

Politicians have a limited amount of time to address their public. An organized group can do much, much more these days.
I LOL'd at the article.

I've never liked those commercials... now I have a concrete reason to dislike the company.

Bring on the ID thefts! He's quite literally asking for it.
This is what we're looking at with our new startup. We have a core featureset that will probably carry a subscription but other than scaling with more 'users' (in our case, employees), I'm not sure of other ways to increase the price without screwing people.
| TVLesson
> I use X in a manner which its creators want me to use it.

I still did not understand this kind of often repeated argument, after years and years of reading it. Why _exactly_ should I freely, without any legal and consensual contract, limit my usage of any particular product X (be it a hammer, a car, a song, or a office spreadsheet) in any kind of way its manufacturer wishes after the point of sale?

This must be some kind of moral argument, please explain.
Thanks, I had missed that post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1354463
Did it ever occur to you that they have looked at your requests months before you sent them in, and decided not to do them for a good reason? Most people do not come up with unuqie suggestions.
It's a common idiom in many programming languages.