skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case.

The sort of operations commonly done on strings only have a small overlap with list operations, though. I'm all for orthogonality in a language when it's practical, but I'm not sure that one is a good trade-off.

Erlang does that, and aside from space issues (on 64-bit, a linked list of character code ints means 16 bytes per char, due to alignment), it's kind of awkward. While using pattern matching on individual chars is nice, in those cases it probably makes more sense to tokenize the strings into atoms/tuples via REs, and then pattern-match on those instead. Binaries can also be used as pseudo-strings, but to me it feels like two half-solutions. (And its shell's printing a list of ints as chars when they're printable 7-bit ASCII characters is a bit odd.) Having atoms (AKA symbols) helps, though.

Incidentally, Lua's strings are all immutable atoms. That's practical most of the time, but occasionally a major liability. Lua has the obvious option of just using a different string implementation via userdata when it's a problem, though, so it can make such a daring trade-off.

Of course, just saving strings as arrays with a \0 at the end is also pretty brittle.
Is there a version of self control for windows? Can you just use the HOSTS file to block sites? I have rescuetime for firefox and etc but I would prefer just a blanket ban.
I'm missing the logic here. If few people make a mistake, they should be informed privately, but if many people make a mistake, they should be shamed publicly? No.

And to be honest, I'm getting slightly tired of the community's tendency to stretch metaphors way beyond their applicability. Mine was mostly meant to add a touch of humor. Pants, flies, and underwear aside, auto-hijacking the Twitter accounts of everyone on your network is just dickish (no pun intended). Especially when the belt store is closed to everyone except the pants-manufacturers ;)
Archos do a 10-inch tablet and generally it's okay spec wise e.g. capacitive screen. I've not read any reviews yet as it's only just out.
> The take-away is that graphene gear will never be possible

Nor heavier-than-air flight, of course!
You are incorrect. There is no concept of time or space "before" the Big Bang; I say "before" in quotes because there is no "before" the Big Bang.

In the earliest part of the Big Bang time did exist. The Big Bang created time.
"We're sorry, an application error has occurred. Good bye!" :(
Last thing before you go to bed, get stuck on a problem. Go to bed. You'll wake up with a solution, and in the meantime get to lay in a comfy bed for hours, and maybe even have some cool dreams. Best brain hack ever.
Personally I find giving this much control to any software on my system (to essentially install anything at will) is too dangerous. I've actually stopped using Chrome and moved to the buggier Chromium because of this worry.

Interesting technology though.
Appcelerator and PayPal Team Up to Make Cross-platform Mobile Commerce
There's a 'new' TLS (SSL) feature called Server Name Indication, which allows more than one cert per IP address.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication

It has surprisingly high client support, but obviously isn't universal enough for you to rely on it working.

With a protocol which doesn't require a certificate, you're still subject to MITM attacks. These are particularly viable on public wifi networks -- just set up a rogue access point.
In order to do FirePiggyInTheMiddle, you need to control the router. You can't just sit in the subnet and start sending commands to random clients to hijack their connection, especially when it is symmetrically encrypted.
You can make this much easier on yourself.

First, just give them 64 feeds and tell them about it on some form of status bar. The "updating your feeds 63/64" progress bar, but maybe yellow with "We're only updating 64 of your feeds. [a href="why-premium/"]Why?[/a]"

Also, you can choose those 64 feeds to update as a union of what they have subscribed to and what you're currently already having to fetch, thereby making the necessary amount of work for each new user theoretically less in the best case, and no worse in the worst case.
Personally I think that Spotlight style search launchers are the best way to launch applications. If the search launcher is designed halfway well, with learning about which applications you use most often it only takes a few keypresses to bring up the applications you need.

Of course with touch devices it is probably more convenient to swipe to the application icon you want and touch it, but on the PC I find it much easier to click the search icon, type the app name and press enter.
$249 Android tablet from Barnes & Noble
Yes, I have a recommendation.

Get 10 packets of 8.5 X 14 printer paper. (8.5 X 11 works too, but not as well)

Make a tower for your keyboard. Make another tower for your mouse. Tilt your monitor back by putting something underneath it.

Adjust the height by adding or removing packets.

I have no idea why people don't do this immediately when they're considering a standing desk. Everything you need is in the printer room of your office!
The End of the College Textbook as We Know It?
I really hope they pull through on the promise to improve and invest in the platform. I've been playing with it lately and it is fun to work with and shows lots of potential, but it's full of holes and inconsistencies. Despite those issues, I'm considering going with it for my newest mobile project and this announcement is encouraging.
Sadly, you are probably right.

Sadly, because JavaScript is not a language I would recommend to beginners.
How many beefy buddies does it take to lift six hundred pounds? And remember that it's ice, so getting a good grip is a serious problem.
I was about to make a comment complaining about them taking so long, but after looking it up the iPad has only been out for half a year. Seems like it has been longer than that.
there might be entire civilizations of life forms billions of years ahead of us technology wise inside the atoms that make up the particles in the air we breath. Our entire universe may be an atom that makes up a single blob unit of a cell inside an entity that is larger than our known universe.

It would make an interesting sci-fi movie, to finally make contact with an advanced race that lives inside an electron.
Audio interview: Thomas Fuchs on Scripty2 and the future of Prototype
Or you can just learn a simple programming question or two that you can ask them to write the answer to. Example:

string itoa(int i)

{

//convert integer to its string representation

}

In my experience this will tell you enough about the person's proficiency to make a decision. I've seen so many people fall apart on this question in so many different ways it's not even funny. The ones who get it have all been pretty good hires.
Javascript is an asynchronous languaje, as soon as you learn how to take advantaje of that you would have a better understaning of javascript. So my recomendation, is to learn Ajax as soon as posible.

Using jQuery is a great way to do it because it that the problem of browser compatibility.
I've pretty happily switched to Chrome, which seems to do everything I used to ask Firebug to do.

Although honestly I no longer use Firebug because I no longer use Firefox, and I no longer use Firefox because it takes up an obscene amount of vertical real estate compared to Chrome.
Heroku and all hosted websites are down
~ 28:00 "bored developers create testing frameworks and templating languages"
Only for people who memorize application names. I bet you feel fine in front of a CLI, too. (Not a knock against, I like Launchy as well.)

Do some time as a tech support, and eventually you'll get a request to help them with "this application, you know, the blue one. With the pictures and stuff?"
The list of companies supporting Fair Search is a bit disingenuous. There's a lot of double-counting to make it look like more firms are against the Google move.

Expedia owns both TripAdvisor and Hotwire.

Sabre Holdings owns Travelocity (and is a direct competitor to ITA).

Kayak owns SideStep.
This. I was looking at this and came to the same conclusion.

Either use PayPal X, or split the deal into two transactions, one where the end merchant gets paid and one where you get paid (either by the user or the end merchant).

The only circumstances I'd use the route suggested in the OP would be if the merchants provided the goods/services upfront removing risk from one side of the equation. In which case you'd be behaving like a retailer, purchasing goods from your suppliers (the merchants) and selling them to your customers.
How is that response to my question? Obviously HN can not be anything but an online discussion forum, and it can only be judged on those merits. How you choose to spend your time is well beyond the scope of my consideration.
Amazon launches new shopping app for iPad: Windowshop
I use Chrome for many tasks, but there are little things I go back to FireBug for.

For some reason the WebKit request explorer doesn’t show cookie headers, for instance.
users have been encouraged to keep documents on the desktop

Almost every piece of windows software I can remember installing has asked me if I wanted to create a desktop icon for the application. I have a whopping...2 documents there.

This hasn't required any special effort on my part, many applications default to saving in the user or (later) 'My documents' folders. I typically open documents from the file manager or via a 'Recent' menu, but prefer to launch the app if I starting a new document, and can't say I've noticed an irresistible trend for doing things the other way - if you ask me, it depends on the person rather than being driven by the OS.
Now to see if they leave allow a full Android environment or lock it down.
Yes -- a single hidden namespace would be cleaner, but then you miss out on all the fun of playing around with this stuff in the console! Here's some one-liners to try with a full Todo list:

Todos.pluck("content");

Todos.first().toggle();

Todos.last().clear();
"There's also a lot of individual variation, though."

Bingo. I need 9-10 hours. Sometimes I sleep 11 hours. And I never feel groggy after getting that much sleep, as some people do, nor do I just lay around in bed. I literally sleep 10 hours straight. I only got 4-5 a night during undergrad, and it took a severe toll. Speaking of undergrad, I knew a guy who had to get 13-14 hours/day, but he had some sleep disorder. Still, he had enough time to study and graduate with a great GPA, was very in shape, played hockey, and was a nice guy. I think a lot of people who think they'll be more successful at 4-5 hours/day are just less efficient and have a distorted view of what their "successful" role models do (i.e. they think their role models must not sleep a lot, therefore if they don't sleep/do work more, they'll also be successful). Just what I've seen in my personal experience though, I don't mean to impose this as a general fact.
I used mercurial for a couple of years before switching to git - mostly I didn't like git's complexity or ease of shooting yourself in the foot. I'd suspect these startups have a similar line of reasoning.

The mercurial CLI is well thought out and easy to use vs git's incredible number of commands and command line options, and is also similar to SVN which probably helps get people up to speed. Generally with hg there's one right way to do things, but many with git.

As far as shooting yourself in the foot goes, git's ability to rewrite history is great for maintaining a clean revision history even after commits are made. Rebasing is quite handy for keeping multiple branches up to date and easy to merge. But these are power tools that can result a lot of pain if they aren't used properly.

I switched to git because the extra power and flexibility was more than worth the cost, and git's branching model ends up working much better for me, but mercurial is a very nice tool!
The magic of cloud computing: As someone running an app on Heroku, I had no idea. Luckily, I simply don't care.

Our app has a cyclic usage pattern and all is quiet right now. So rather than freaking out about it, I'll just let someone at Heroku figure it all out.

It would suck if it happened during our busy period, but then again I could say "We're working on it." and just assume the Heroku team will fix things faster than I ever could have with my limited *nix admin skills.
Please sign up for the beta here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dDNkei1Hb0l...
Good PR firms do a lot more than stunts.

This would be a whole new category of firm. Stunt marketing. You give us money, we get you attention.

Hey, that actually sounds like a pretty fun business to run.
You are describing my work flow already and I didn't even need to install this. I only needed to check HN enough times when I hit compile that it is now some sort of a muscle-memory reflex.
How would you judge their answer if you're not a programmer?
I think it's important to note that these people weren't targeted as a result of their search history, they were already targeted, and the search history was just used as evidence for further action.

So me searching for "how much antifreeze..." wouldn't ever be noticed, unless i was _already_ under suspicion that met legal standards for a warrant, so that search data was requested.
HTML5 Boilerplate v0.9.5 Released
PayPal says it's cheaper for the seller above $12 to use the $.30 + 2.9% fee. You are skeptical, so let's do the math:

$12 x 2.9% = $0.348 + $.30 (flat fee) = $0.648
$12 x 5% = $0.6 + $0.05 (flat fee) = $0.65

The "larger rate" is actually cheaper above $12.

Amazon (whose fees are identical to Paypal except their magic number where you move between fee scales is $10) actually creates a "dead zone" above $10 and under $12 where you're charged at the higher rate which is more in processing fees than the lower rate would be.
Learn the answer. It's not very long. You can have some followup questions like "How would you test this?" or "What range of values would this work for?". Most of the time people don't even know what range of values can be stored in a 32 bit integer (or even in the general area). It's pretty easy to learn 3-4 facts to know more than the people you don't want to hire.
Still got one. :)

It has an awesome design and it can also be seen in some movies (names don't come to mind though, but I've seen them), e.g. painted in some fancy color. :)
I would have expected railscasts.com to be mentionned, such a great resource to learn Ruby on Rails.
Thanks for the link, had not seen Uplink before. It's not what I was trying to remember though. I'm basically talking about a website. On the first screen it has a username and a password box. The password check is hardcoded into the JS on the page and viewsource gives it to you. Completing it gets you to the next stage. The next stage has no such info, but the password is easily guessable. The one after can be beaten by a cookie modification, the one after that involves injecting some variables into a server-side script etc etc... At each stage it links you to articles which may be relevant tothe task at hand; It's like a step-by-step training to hacking websites, graded nicely in difficulty from the trivial up to some reasonably difficult techniques at the higher stages.
The last round of YC companies was getting $10M valuations, an order of magnitude over a few years ago, under the valuations-don't-matter mantra.

Are these the valuations that they're getting from YC, or from investors post-YC? If post-YC, couldn't this be due largely to more of the companies being Ramen Profitable? If they raise money after four months rather than three, they've been growing (perhaps at an exponential rate) for 33% longer.
My Firefox takes up less vertical real estate than Chrome. I use Tiny Menu, customize the toolbars to put everything into the menu bar, and use Tree-Style Tabs to show the tabs vertically along the right side. The best option I have at work is Chrome, and having the tabs along the top is much less usable compared to Tree-Style Tabs.
> For some reason the WebKit request explorer doesn’t show cookie headers, for instance.

Mmm indeed, that's interesting, I'd never noticed. It shows the Set-Cookie response headers but not the Cookie request ones.
I use Heroku for subscription software services, online retail stores, and phone ordering system for our staff.

Right now all of our sites are failing with 503 errors. Our store is down and when one of our employees went to take a phone order they got a "Welcome to your new app" message.

I've been a big evangelist of Heroku since we migrated over last year, but I'm getting deeply concerned about the elevated error rate since every minute is costing us money.
How Spotify Almost Sold To Google For $1 Billion, Plus New Apple Rumors
Mandelbrot benchmarks for several languages
Ha, I submitted my 'CV' as a (trivially) encrypted PDF. If I have to hack their site to apply, they have to hack my CV to read my application :-)
I simply tried here and got lucky twice already.

Simply post a 'Looking for a designer' with some basic requirements (job duration, an idea of the scope and your location preferences) and ask for portfolio links.

That'll get you plenty of response.

Make sure you put an email address in the text area of your profile!

One of the issues some people run in to when looking for designers and programmers is that they want to scrape the bottom of the barrel pricewise, but that is going to get you in to a very long period where you'll be looking at stuff that doesn't cut it.

In that case I'd suggest moving 'upmarket' a bit and spend what it's really worth. If you ever get lucky and find that $10 per hour designer or programmer that delivers stellar work let me know.

One that I have no personal experience with but that has a really nice portfolio lives here: http://www.gursimran.com/ , I've spent half a day just looking through her website and flickr album, quite amazing.

--

edited for clarity.
A much more likely and easier setup is to poison DNS with results that direct the victim to your own machine.
Google TV Giveaway for Web Developers
without the threat of failure, we have no incentive to improve.

Yeah, but widespread bank failures would have completely wrecked the economy, as in the Great Depression. The people worst hurt would have been the ordinary workers losing their jobs, not the bankers.

A better compromise would have been for the bailout to come with real pain for the banking execs—fines, or blacklisting, or at least compensation caps.

Frankly, the war is a bigger issue anyway.

Yes.
If you just need design (little "d"), it would be hard to recommend anything other than 99designs.com, since you can get dozens of people to do the design work you need on spec, at effectively no cost to you, then pick the best (or none at all).

If you need Design (big "D"), then you get what you pay for, and you should be going with established, known quantities like an identity/brand specialized design agency. They do cost a lot of money, but that's because Design (big "d") is very hard.

The difference is that Design (big "D") is about strategy and communication, whereas design (little "d") is about drawing and coloring. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you need the other, and sometimes you need both.
I was really opinionated ten years ago, before I had tried to build anything serious. These days, I think every choice is a trade-off. I wonder if I'll ever be opinionated again.
No it isn't. I still want a Conetree godammit:

http://www.infovis.net/imagenes/T1_N173_A1014_ConeTreeIntera...
From the site:

This promotional program is open to U.S.-based companies that either provide web development services for their own consumer-facing websites or are involved primarily in the business of providing web development services for other consumer-focused websites and online businesses. To enter your company for an opportunity to win a free Logitech Revue with Google TV device, you must submit your company information through the provided online form below, along with a brief statement about how your company will use Google TV in connection with its web development efforts. We’ll pick the winners by selecting the entries that we think are best presented and that will offer the most valuable contributions to Google TV users and developers
there are some things the chrome/webkit debugger still lacks compared to firebug though. I like how firebug always shows a stack trace when there are errors during runtime. In chrome/webkit, you just get a little red x in the console with an error message, but you have to find out the root cause yourself.
Learn the answer.

Then you risk rejecting exceptional candidates who didn't come up with the answer that you learned.
For me, that usually just leads to insomnia. If I read anything remotely interesting within an hour or so of bed, it takes me a long time to wind down. YMMV.

When I'm stuck during the day, a context change (such as a gym break) often has the same effect though.
I have noticed the same issues here. Thought it was my systems at first, but then noticed it from other systems and various browsers as well. Seems like it happens for me more in Chrome than other browsers, but it does happen with Firefox and IE as well.

Since it does not happen all the time I can't explain it. My initial thought would be they made a CSS change somewhere and the old CSS is cached on one of their servers. When you happen to hit that cached version you get the incorrect formatting. IMO.

While it is a growing pain, it is a minor one at that. They will overcome it and move on.
How exactly is the fact that you didn't know about the outage "the magic of cloud computing"?

I get that you're saying your users don't care/didn't notice, but I'm clearly missing something because if I had an app on Heroku, I'd be a little nervous. When the cyclic nature of your app swings back around and it's in regular use again, this kind of outage might not be so magical.
I think you're right in thinking the "wrong kind of opinionated".

I'm pretty f'ing opinionated about certain things and those are not trivial things - testing for instance.

I'm also opinionated about languages but I can clearly articulate why I would choose python over ruby and vice versa in any given situation. Same goes for rdbms vs. schemaless data stores.

Some of my favorite and best interviews have been geeking out discussing technology with a potential employeer.

What was really left out was "make friends with a trusted geek". Have someone you can call on to perform the interview on your behalf. I have pretty solid bullshit detector and have frequently helped out friends who couldn't find a technical resource to perform a phone screen.
I'm in the same bandwagon as you. But I still think I can discuss passionately the tradeoffs of the different choices at length.
we here at wepay have a tremendous amount of respect for paypal. they have built a huge business, growing at 27% per year, with large margins and nearly a hundred billion dollars in annual payment volume.

however - we do vehemently disagree with the way they treat their customers and won't pull punches when we express ourselves about a topic we care dearly about
Fare search or unfair search? Travel sites try to block Google's purchase of ITA
> and I no longer use Firefox because it takes up an obscene amount of vertical real estate compared to Chrome.

Obscene? On OSX with Firefox 3.6 and Chrome 6, the difference is about the height of Firefox's tabs on top, with the web developer toolbar enabled. Disable/hide the web dev toolbar and the difference is a few pixels in favor of Chrome.

nb: status bar and bookmarks toolbar disabled in Firefox.