skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You said "I don't like the keyword "if" so I'm hiding it with && and || because I haven't thought deep enough about a better way of structuring my code"

In addition to talking about ternaries, guards and defaults, the article discusses myriad techniques aimed at replacing conditional logic with entirely non-conditional approaches (both functional and oop).These include function dispatching, function delegation, use of high order functions, functions as data and polymorphism.

These techniques aren't going to work for everyone and it would be very cool if you chimed in with your own experiences. What's not cool is misrepresenting the article.
My girlfriend has nagged me to try it, but I still see it as something my grandfather wore.
Frixion pens are so much better than the old Erasermates it's not even funny.
We have the largest amount of illegal aliens in the nation. I have seen numbers listed from 9 billion a year up to 20 billion a year spent on public services for illegals. This would include education, health care, and public assistance. (California is known for having generous benefits compared to other states) This is in addition to all of the other problems mentioned in the article. Pensions for state workers is turning out to be a huge issue and is threatening to bankrupt many municipalities. (the city of Los Angeles for example) The wages of public employees has risen much greater than private sector in many cases. I just read about some gardeners that work a LAX who make $50K a year and the City of Bell was paying its city manager $800k a year. (extreme case)
You should absolutely buy this book; it's fantastic and extremely readable. Flip to a random page: oh look, it's every herb used in mainstream and ethnic cooking in the west, broken down by key volatile compounds!

McGee's column in the NY Times is also required reading. McGee "broke the story" on gelatin consommes, for example (which by the way one of the coolest tricks ever: simmer anything in water for a few hours, strain, pour in 1/4 packet of gelatin, cool it, freeze it, and then let it thaw in a strainer in the fridge; the gelatin does for the broth what a raft does for a classic consomme --- just read the article; teaser: perfectly clear chocolate consomme ---

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/dining/05curi.html
The Freedom I Found in Five Finger Shoes
Or because they did not increase spending by this amount, 2003 might have been artificially low for accounting reasons:

Expenditures are estimated to drop from $78.1 billion in 2002-03 to $70.8 billion in 2003-04, a 10 percent decline.
Most of this decline can be explained by four factors: the VLF rate increase (which reduces state subventions to backfill local governments), new federal funds, borrowing to cover the state's 2003-04 pension obligations, and the Medi-Cal accounting shift from an accrual to cash basis.
Absent these factors, underlying spending would be roughly equal between the two years. The 2003-04 spending level is considerably less than what would be required to maintain baseline spending for the year.

http://www.lao.ca.gov/2003/major_features_03-04/major_featur...
I get a rock solid 16 mbps here on the Toronto area for 39.95 and it doesn't matter how many HD channels I'm watching. This is Cogeco using coax and they preassigned a bank for television a bank for voip and a bank for the internet. The crowding is generally a problem of telcos that are sticking with twisted pair (i.e. ADSL)
C++ for C programmers, part 2 of 2 (the OO features)
Fun thought experiment: Suppose the web didn't have any search engines, but somehow grew to its current size. Now suppose someone proposes starting one up. Exactly how large is the resulting firestorm?
Gmail sells oodles of advertising. It's not profitable?
Nah...I play Protoss :P
> Property taxes on owned property only rise 2% a year. (very low, consider that my parent's Bay Area home has risen by about 5.7% yearly since the 1980s) What that leaves you with is entrenched residential and commercial property owners paying relatively very little in taxes.

You're forgetting that their property taxes are continuing to go up even though property values have gone down significantly. Why? Because their assessed value is below market value and as long as that's true, their taxes go up.

That factor makes property tax revenues far less volatile than they would be otherwise.

We know what counties and cities do when property tax revenues boom without a cap - they ramp up their spending. When property values crash, as they do every decade or so, that tanks their revenue, so cities and counties jack up the rates.

> If you are a new resident though, you get no immediate benefit - your taxes are assessed at the purchased value.

You get the benefit of knowing how your property taxes will behave. (If you buy right before a crash, you do get a respite until values recover.)

> that's $17.6 billion a year - pretty much the budget deficit of the state.

It's also significantly less than state spending has increased in the last few years. Note that the state isn't supposed to get property tax revenues - they're collected by cities and counties.
Issues in the Proof that P ≠ NP
Personally, I can't imagine staying in the same place for 20 years unless I was old and retired, and if I was old and retired I would retire to someplace cheaper.

Opportunities come and go, and committing to live in the same place for 20 years is a huge risk if that place dries up and someplace else starts to boom.
Stifling innovation? - there's an app for that!™
Resist metaphors for this sort of thing. Resist them strongly. There are no physical analogues for the internet that are close enough to matter. When I scan a book page, the author and publisher are so untroubled they don't even know, indeed, they can't know. When I look at a web page, they have to actually serve it to me, costing them some amount of money. Money you can only call trivial when you aren't scraping pages by the thousands. This is enough to render your metaphor irrelevant by virtue of significant, both in the sense of "sizable" and in the sense of "relevant", difference.

There's no physical analogue to scraping a database-driven site. The question of exactly how legal it is probably won't be settled until that fact penetrates the legal system; until then it depends on what metaphor you sell to a given judge.
I wrote this article like I am every day. Please read my personal blog or my twitter if you don't believe me:

http://tenderlovemaking.com/

http://twitter.com/tenderlove

I'm sorry. I will try to sound less artificial in the future. :-(
Videotron has the cable monopoly in Quebec. It's fast and reliable but man is it expensive.
> I'm not a fan of raising taxes, but I consider our state being broke to be a bit worse.

Why is cutting spending not an option?

CA's tax revenues are significantly higher than the spending just a few years ago. Would it really be unreasonable to cut back to that level of spending? (Note that unemployment is largely paid for by the federal govt, so ....)
It's totally not artificial. That's just how Aaron (yc user tenderlove and author of the article) talks and writes. It's totally sincere. See his blog and twitter for further evidence. http://tenderlovemaking.com http://twitter.com/tenderlove
Where to start?

* It's not $600; it's $425.

* That's not far from what TAOCP costs per-volume.

* The production quality (and costs) of these books dwarf TAOCP's; TAOCP isn't also a set of coffee-table books.

* They're vitally important to cooking as a profession; moreso because there are so few key books (McGee, New Pro Chef, La Guide) in cooking, especially compared to computing.

* Myrvhold poured a huge, vast, mind-boggling amount of research into these books; they aren't a get rich quick scheme.

* If $500 is too much (and it's too much for me!), you aren't the audience; you want Cooks Illustrated instead.

* "Waiting for a torrent": classy.
Depends if you go along to the gym with people you know or just by yourself. Having a chat seems to pass the time well enough for me at the gym. That said I've been getting back into bike riding outdoors recently which can be a lot more fun.
Ask HN: What if your parent said they wanted to become a programmer?
I've been doing freelance / contract LAMP development for about three years now and I'm doing pretty well. Better than my family, which is how this whole thing got started.

About a year ago, in preparation for my little brother starting at an expensive private college (which my family can't afford), I started teaching him to program. Fast-forward a year later and he's at the point where I throw him my junior stuff and he can pretty easily make $30 - 40 / hr. He's good with Wordpress, CakePHP, Facebook apps, etc. I'm actually really pleased at how well it's turned out.

Now my dad is interested in going down the same road. He's in his late 40s and has been a general contractor (construction) his whole life, and the last few years have been rough on my family financially. However, he's actually fairly technical and I suspect would easily grok the principles of programming, especially most LAMP dev, which isn't terribly challenging. He called me looking for advice, and I'm not entirely sure what to tell him. I don't think he'll be looking to join a startup at 50 (but who knows), and I'm not even sure if he'd be looking for a job. I think contract / freelance is more attractive to him at this point, because he's interested in some flexibility and making better money. I know he can learn what he needs to, and he has plenty of client management experience, but will he be able to find work? Will people hire a good developer who is older like that? I just wasn't prepared for seeing my Dad go down the road of building crappy Wordpress blogs for $1500 like I had to do, and I'm wondering what advice people have for how he might make this kind of switch, or whether it's worth doing at all.

Is starting programming only for the young?
Fundraise for a new website for Colin Percival's Tarsnap first, please. ;)

I'll even chip in!
Counterexamples to relativity - huh?
haha, that's good.
Not sure why you're getting negged here; using nginx without Varnish, you're not going to get nearly the speed, and using Vanish on Apache just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Not sure what you mean by "has some performance penalty compared to Varnish" however.
Check out # 9, 11, and 18 especially.
"If you want to get a bootstrapped startup off the ground...somewhere in the early days...you'll have to break #1."

This is baloney and has a higher chance of making great cofounders and hackers (like, for example, Marc Andreessen: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/how-to-hire-the-best-peo...) run for the hills rather than work with you. If investors or business partners catch you seriously lying once you are basically permanently blacklisted. You might be able to eke out some kind of business from that black hole, but it is not easy.

"Third and final criterion: ethics.

Ethics are hard to test for.

But watch for any whiff of less than stellar ethics in any candidate's background or references.

And avoid, avoid, avoid." - pmarca
"Consumer" is too broad of a word. This probably applies more to "entertainment" web startups, where "buzz" is more important.
But the ink would also rub off onto the facing sheet of paper, I have a whole high school worth of unreadable notes from this (not that anyone wants to read my high school notes after 20years!)
Cal has got some pretty great articles and has written a lot for students. I wonder if he's going to graduate.
I'm still not entirely clear about the implications of this. Does this mean that Verizon can prioritize V-Cast over "Internet" when sending data to their phones? That seems like a big win for Verizon. They've always promoted their psudo-internet.

Does V-Cast ship on Droids?
What about a digital P2P cryptocurrency system?
Obviously not a real (ie mechanical) engineer.
One of the most annoying things is when you are forced to write with a pen (legal reasons) instead of the beloved pencil.
Sixth, we both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wireline world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly."

Not anymore. We'll probably get 4G fairly soon just because 3G capacity is already getting taxed but going forward wireless providers can simply gimp traffic to save money on infrastructure improvements. What incentive is there to push forward on 5G when you can just go tell the network engineers to adjust a few variables and save you billions of dollars? Of course if Google or some other gigantic company wants to pay to have that variable turned down less aggressively that seems to be fair game. I can't believe how naive/dishonest Google is being about this.
Apparently not because:

a) the shear scale of their email operation = large costs
b) poor conversion on those ads as users are not in the "search" mindset when reading emails where as they are more likely to click on an ad when searching
I did; I bought the classic scented body wash. I also finally invested in a loofah (I used to use a bar of soap). I'm rather happy about it. Normally, I wouldn't consider myself someone swayed by advertising, but that guy Isaiah's hilarious. So I figured, why not :)
I just mentioned a UPnP router because I think most home routers I see here given buy ISPs support it. There are other ways as well, and yes that includes falling back to TCP if UDP doesn't work.

I'm just saying that everything skype does can be done with OSS using open standards. That skype is in any way technologically superior is mostly result of excessive FUD campaigns IMHO. :)
I think it is more than sincere, it is earnest.
Note that I defined n as the input size...
An idea in your head.
Use this mirror link if you can't get to the actual site http://bit.ly/cUavpF (matt.might.net.nyud.net)
Continuous interference is detrimental to efficient functioning of representative democracy. It is difficult for a government to rule if it is second-guessed by the voters using the initiative system.

California's initiative system creates problems wherein the populace votes emotionally (PROP 8). A lot of times, the initiative system has a weakness in the fact that the voting public is easily swayed by easy simplifications of complex issues and is unable to see the big picture.
Hmm, interesting! The way I guessed these FriXion pens work is the ink is actually liquid plastic and by friction, the plastic inks gets rubbed away when "erased". I guess that explains my curiosity of why there isn't any "ink residues" after the ink is erased away.

Still, I'll much prefer these friXion pens over the new Sharpies since under normal usage, writings usually don't get exposed to tremendous heat. So to me and perhaps normal users, these friXion pens are more like erasable pens since they are not subject to the 3 day rule the new Sharpies impose.

The only question remains is if these new Sharpies' "liquid graphite" writes like a real pencil, in which case, it would have a totally difference use and market (art, drafting, etc.). Since it says it's available already, I'll probably grab some and find out for myself. I'm cited!
Microsoft site attempts to discourage PC users from switching to Mac
I've learned something about the news today.

If A has a good reputation and B has a bad reputation, and A and B come to a compromise, it makes the reputation of A worse, and doesn't make the reputation of B any better, regardless of what the compromise actually is.

Verizon is so toxic that them just being a party to this taints it for everyone it seems. If this agreement were something that Google was _demanding_ of Verizon rather than something they agreed to with Verizon, everyone would be praising it.
Competing wireless providers? In the US we effectively have a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon. The fall off to T-Mobile/Sprint in terms of coverage is dramatic. There may be some spots where you have 4 good choices but for many of us it's AT&T or Verizon if we want acceptable service & speeds. Both AT&T and Verizon mimic each other's pricing structures and policies. We just need to look at Sprint who is trying to offer lower prices and faster speeds yet is still losing money. The duopoly owns the most valuable chip -- coverage. The other players are at a permanent disadvantage because they can't grow with inadequate coverage nor can they address the coverage problem with poor growth.
Perhaps it might make a good ruggedization material? Apple appears to be highly interested in materials that would make a portable product have a very long life in your pocket (gorilla glass).
Ask HN: Curious how many developers experiment with drugs?
This is a legitimate question. I'm not trolling or trying to be goofy

I'm curious as to how many developers use/experiment with drugs?

If you do, what kind, how often, and how do you apply yourself when you are "high"?
Does it help you think clearer, more creatively, or do you use it to relax, etc..?

I use to smoke weed on a regular basis and found it helped me think differently about problems. I've cut down since and reserve it for weekends or when I feel like it would aid in what I'm doing.

How about you guys?
Steve Blank: The Rise of the Lean VC - Consumer Internet Gets Its Own Investors
I actually don't know a mac user that doesn't at least have boot camp installed.
Interesting viewpoint Elad. A few points/considerations:

Building equity valuable companies is way tougher and much riskier. Your examples of Google, Facebook, Twitter are all rare. And for every Goog, Twitter, FB, there are many carcasses of others who've not made it. For entrepreneurs balancing risk-reward, trying to build a company that is solely equity valuable is tough.

Also, I don't think the equation is quite so binary. Cash businesses, by virtue of the cash they generate, can expand and enter adjacent markets and these growth initiatives can increase the equity value of the company. Amazon comes to mind.

Lastly, although these cash businesses are not as sexy, there is still equity value there. There is a whole ecosystem of mid-market private equity firms interested in these types of companies and buying their equity.
HTML5 Reset
8 Surprising Facts About The Shrinking Middle Class From 'Third World America'
Frankly I am amused by this article, 64 million is just a drop in the bucket for RIAA. Any moderately successful brand has yearly advertising budget of ~10-20 million $s. The psychological effect of even having a small chance of being sued is amazing.

Also threat of litigation has made a number of universities change their policy on internet usage and torrents. Thus that alone is a significant return.
Here's a terribly unscientific idea since you have an idea of total potential market.

Look at ratio of assets in value mutual funds to all other mutual funds. Might give a sense for size of the "value" market.
What's the rationale for adding dynamic typing to C#?

Is it only to support interop with dynamic languages (Iron*)?

I'm not against the idea but it seems like a minor use-case to add a major language feature for. Unless there's something else I'm missing.

In the past, C# added new language features in order to support some specific goal.

Extension methods, lambdas and expression trees were added mainly to support LINQ. They're good features on their own, for sure, but the reason they were added is because the language team wanted to do LINQ.

What's the larger goal here?
I made a browser-based chat app. Based on node.js and nodechat.
How Eye Tracking Will Redefine The Web
I 100% agree with you. I've both telecommuted and worked in-person, and there is nothing that beats face to face interaction. Period.

The 'oh I need alone time to solve problems' excuse is as awful and trite a cliché as 'programmers drink Mt. Dew and live in the basement'.

Being an in-person employee does not mean you're working in an mega-corporate shackled environment damaging to your fragile hacker self -- it means you are simply able to directly and immediately converse with your coworkers. Excited hackers stammering out 'HOLY CRAP GUYS I FIGURED OUT THE CACHING PROBLEM What do you think about XYZ?' and the ensuing flurry of discussion is not something duplicated via IRC/email.
My question is how you manage to stay in business with such flawed 'reasonings'.

That benchmark in particular is so full of crap that people will become dumber after reading it.
How does it compare with cygwin? Can I fire up bash with SUA?
I would really like to see some advice on how to do customer development for consumer apps. This is really targeted at b2b people.
You can spawn your own twich room by just linking to

http://twich.me/any_room_name
or
http://2wi.ch/any_room_name

Works on iOS and Android too.

Comments and feedback appreciated.
Being a 'real' in-person employee doesn't mean you don't have quiet time to think through problems.
Startup Weekend Project Mayor Wars in the iPhone App Store
It's weird. I never found notebooks all that useful until a relative bought me a Moleskine as a gift. I can't put the stupid thing down now, there's definitely some kind of "there" there...a kind of delicious physical quality that makes me want to write stuff in it.
I interviewed Nathan for my book (Cooking for Geeks, O'Reilly 2010) and will be posting the interview online in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, to those that complain about the price, I would guess-but do not know-that it is probably being sold at printing cost. Nathan did not write this book to make money; he wrote it to advance the field of culinary arts in ways that only someone with his resources can.

-Jeff
GHD Precious Gift Set
Provides varies of GHD ceramic hair straighteners.Help you make your own hairstyle. 24*7 Online shop.High quality and low price.Free shipping and professional servies.
Where for me to start?

* Lost my job

* Sued for medical bills because insurance didn't cover what they said they would.

* Dumped my fiancé after horrendous fights and my emotional stability.

* Apartment complex broke my contract by letting her out of lease while holding me liable for the whole contract.

* Finally evicted and living in a spare room of good friends out of the goodness of their hearts.

* 3 month wait on unemployment in Indiana because employer disputed it.

* School is paid for, but due to medical condition when I failed school, they refuse me admittance calling it an academic issue - oxycontin, perocet, and hydrocodone = finals fail.

* My right arm can only bend in certain areas but load bearing above my head is less than 5lbs. Disabled enough for free schooling, but not enough for SS disability.

* 10% unemployment in this area.

So yes, maybe i'm "classy". However, you have no idea of my circumstances. Its not like I could afford it anyway. The lawsuits for garnishment for my medical bills have netted 0$. Cant get work. And im relying on my friends for food even, until food stamps are granted.

So go ahead, heap on the criticism.
The key events that I see are:

1) The outsourcing boom

2) The Nixon Shock: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_Shock

3) The elimination of Glass-Steagal

#1 killed the well-paying blue collar job and unions. #2 killed the stability of the dollar. #3 (especially combined with #2!) allowed banks to leverage regular deposits to inflate M3 and create mega-bubbles and then drop their losses on the depositors and the taxpayers.

Put it all together, and we are indeed on our way to third world status: 10% own 90%, everyone else is poor.

Then add in the recent resumption of Vietnam-style expensive smoldering meat-grinder warfare, which is bankrupting the federal government. Then, for the cherry on top, throw in peak oil.
How is this different than 'most every other tax? One way or another, it's always one group of people subsidizing another group. Why the call for tax equality here, when in pretty much every case we hear calls for "progressive this" and "helping disadvantaged that"?
So... buy a copy of all of then and throw away the diffs? :D