skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s a big problem for me that there are no good multi-protocol IM apps for iOS. To say nothing of the general horridness of all single-protocoll IM apps (Sykpe excluded).

I could understand that a great IM app could have some draw.
If the author wants to rant, I would think digging into the motives for Apple backing away from Java support might be more fertile territory. At least it'd have more substance to it that what amount to PR positions on numbers.

Things to ponder... Could Apple be trying to throw a wet towel on doing Java development for other platforms (Android in particular)?

Of course if they're wanting more of a closed system, they're probably also aware that some of the more popular peer to peer apps use Java too. (Limewire / Frostwire, Vuze / Azureus). Between not being allowed on the store, Java probably not being installed by default soon, and questionable robustness of future Java options, they've thrown a wet towel on the sharing apps too.

It's not like the cost of paying developers to work on Java is a burden for Apple, and it doesn't have the reputation Flash does for crashing/slowing the system.

Vulnerabilities could be an excuse to stay clear of Java, but like Flash, if users have it installed and have to get updates outside of the (semi) automatic software updates, users are less likely to be up to date, not more.

If the author wants a little speculation for his rant, he ought to ask questions like will Steve kill X11?

The Mac with OS X has had a lot of respect as a stable very interoperable do-everything platform. If Apple wants to change that, some of us will be kicking and screaming.
Apple has been able to give users an extra nudge towards new hardware by limiting the length of time old hardware sees major OS updates. (The 1985 Mac Plus was still supported under System 7.5, well past the five year period seen now). Killing support for something without the justification of certain hardware being inadequate is a tougher pill to swallow. If Apple goes too far, they'll certainly lose more science/engineering types to Linux.
The article said “re-launch”, I don’t think that’s very misleading.
On Generics: I did not know they performed that slight-of-hand, internally. That does make them rather weak.

On Java-bloat: to be fair, it's really not that much, especially if it's already a known interface:
new TreeSet<Foo>(new Comparator<Foo>() {
public void compare(Foo a, Foo b) { mycode(); }
});

However, your point stands. I've just come to accept that as being a part of Java, myself.
Also, being hover driven, you have to carefully stay on the hovered item and horizontally move to the pop-out menu instead of moving diagonally. Kind of infuriating, to be honest.
Why High-Speed Traders Should Set up Shop in Siberia
Congratulations from a fellow AC'er. At this rate you guys will probably be moving out in the very near future. Really impressive stuff.
a sexual assault occurred she should go to the police about it and press charges

I disagree. I think she's chosen a pragmatic middle ground here. There's behaviour which everyone (I think) agrees is inappropriate. She says it's happened before, and she wants to stop it from occurring again. She comes up with a legal way to respond, and isn't required to press any charges.

It probably could be prosecuted as a crime, but she has judged (I'll trust correctly) that this does not merit legally wrecking his life and taking up months of her time as a witness. He was drunk and stupid, but she'll recover.
She runs the risk of being socially shunned, but she's unlikely to have this happen to her again at a similar conference.

Yes, one could argue that this would have been as effective by leaving the perpetrator anonymous, and I'd agree. But like the choice of whether to prosecute, I've got to trust her with this decision. So long as her statements are true, she (in my opinion) has the right to use them however she chooses. It's certainly fair to ask her if anonymous might have been better, though.

For male versus female: no, this is still asymmetric, at least in modern American society. On the bright side, at least we've moved to having it be a matter of gender and role rather than solely sex. You might see such a blog post if the woman was in a position of power over the male: an employer, a law enforcer, a politician.
How is this different or better than other instant messaging apps for smartphones?
Here's a similar, stand-alone application called Dictator:

http://dictator.sourceforge.net/dictator.html
Rebecca Murphey: An Online jQuery Class
Essentially all social oriented startups face this problem initially. You need to identify who are the people most likely to adopt your service and focus all your marketing source on them accordingly. Once you build up a sizable user base within your first target group you can then leverage that to launch into other target groups.

Think facebook - initially it was only targeted at college students. Start small and focused
> That doesn't work if you expect struct or array

Ah, good point.
http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/sailing-into-the-wi...
I have been somewhat baffled at the insistence on only comparing "smartphones" vs all devices. Seems to be a fairly irrelevant distinction if you're not an exec at a wireless carrier.
His quotes don't prove that "rationality needs intuition", they only prove that he could be one of the greatest scientific minds ever while also saying things people like to hear.
Mozilla's Kraken Benchmark Update
If Britain can drive costs down by automating factories, then I'm sure China can, too. They have a lot of skilled people, they've proven their willingness to invest big money on manufacturing, and unlike Britain, China actually has a credible plan to deliver cheap electricity over the next two or three decades. Oh, and they have cheap labor to fill in the gaps where you still need people, which is another plus.
As someone considered to be the digerati of my family, I'm very excited to see a website to which I can direct my uncle this Thanksgiving. Great domain name, too.
I think the police force example highlights a truth: once you hit about ten years work, your salary proportional to your skill keeps climbing steeply, but in reality your skill level doesn't really change that much any more.
Thanks for your reply mate, i think i should focus on student geeks (im a 2nd year CS student at UCL), and prehaps try to push it through my uni

btw im on now if u want to chat
What was the winning strategy in Japan? Can you recommend something to read about how the people who _are_ succeeding in Japan are doing it, and which strategies they are following?
So the problem is lack of feedback, you can't check if a command succeeded, only that it was sent? Can this be fixed at the application level with a status check?
It handily converts your buggy pointer traversal code from SEGFAULT to infinite loop.
Do what you love and love what you do.

To live happily, you must understand what 'love' means to you and what you want to 'do' with your life.

Then do it with endless passion.

As a programmer, there is nothing that I like more than coding to solve a problem. I've spent 30 years of my life doing it and it still feels like my first love.

If I had enough money to cover all my worries I'd spend the rest of my life coding.

As I always say, I code to make money to be free to do what I want: coding.
Windows CMD script won't do Ackermann properly
If you add the live_console gem to a rails app, you can use netcat to run IRB against the live application.
You can change the app's state from a console, like flushing a cache or even making a patch, without having to restart the app.
True, although you have to be careful about "incorrect": the code will still compile (unless there's some corner case I'm missing?), so for that particular definition of correctness it is just fine without TCO.

It just won't run (for very long). :)
Even more useful would be typing <product> into Amazon and then arranging search results by number of reviews.

Unfortunately, Amazon doesn't allow this yet.
False accusations of sexual assault are not uncommon.
Wouldn't that be worse ? Instead of a coredump you'll get subtle and hard to track errors.
Exporting would be nice so that one can save the list 'snapshot'. This way we could use it to report our tasks/projects every week. My boss is using Word. It's just not efficient...

Tables are very common on my lists. Maybe you can add support for simple tables to Workflowy too.

Another suggestion: several users accessing the same Workflowy.
Bit of commentary from somebody who was there (but didn't see anything): http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2010/11/06/disappoin...
NotScripts: NoScript Extension for Opera and Chrome
Instead of having everyone come to your own site, can you integrate your idea into existing bulletin boards or social networks as an app or even deeper? Seems like that would be the way to get a ton of users onto your solution quickly.
Emotions seem to be essential to decision-making. People with brain injuries preventing them from having emotions find many things impossible to decide. [1]

But however much we rely on emotions and intuition in our own thinking, they're not easy to communicate, especially to skeptics. Those of us with a scientific and skeptical mindset try not to accept irrational arguments from other people. [2]

So, in some sense, an idea without a rational justification isn't worth very much (yet), because you can't convince most people that it's correct. But it still might have a lot of potential! And if we're talking about hacking then there are other forms of persuasion (code and demos).

[1] http://changingminds.org/explanations/emotions/emotion_decis...

[2] This is especially true of mathematics where rational arguments (that is, proofs) are valued far above any other kind of argument.
The application is actually just revamped as I understand it (based on the above review by Startup North); maybe in a major way but still based on a previous product. As Ted from Kik has responded below, they e-mailed nearly all of their 55K previous users, though very very few of them converted.

Their history deserves mentioning and is likely what put them in a position to be able to launch, market and scale effectively. The users may not be the same, but the strategies and the tactics used to get there are likely based on previous experiences as well as having some great people get them this far.

Obviously this community isn't the target of their post, but I would be even more interested in hearing the whole story: how they went from zero to 55K customers in 7 months, lost almost all of them, and then scaled it back up to a million users in two weeks
I can see how that would be confusing. I'm talking about Red Hat SPICE, a replacement for VNC. http://www.spicespace.org/
Why did you decide not to migrate the existing users?
Finally I see a lot of small sites, forums, blogs, that can't scale easily to small numbers using relational DBs.

When MySQL was in growth stage, about 50% of the downloads accounted for users who were downloading a database for the first time in their lives! (got that piece of info from early MySQL folks). If a small site, forum, or blog can't scale easily on a relational database it is because the developer doesn't know what they're doing. You can make an argument that relational solutions aren't user friendly because they have defaults not suited for small, high-performance sites, or too many features that cripple performance if not used correctly, but IMO that's a silly argument. People don't blame a programming language because their program is slow since they used a O(2^N) algorithm where O(N log N) suffices. Why do people blame a DBMS when they write nonsensical queries that couldn't possibly evaluate in real-time merely for giving them an option to write such queries?

Also it's not just a matter of scalability: latency is a very important constraint.

Many relational databases have sophisticated schedulers that reorder events to maximize queries per second, unless an event has been in the pipe for too long, in which case it is given higher priority and pushed through faster. Most NoSQL products do not even begin to approach this level of sophistication. Even MySQL gives excellent latency characteristics if you know what you're doing - just ask the Facebook folks, they're very serious about latency. Good latency performance is certainly not restricted to NoSQL stores.

Most SQL vs. NoSQL debates usually have the same resolution: traditional DBMSes let you shoot yourself in the foot, while NoSQL solutions usually don't. With a traditional DBMS you better know what you're doing, while with a NoSQL solution you can usually get away with just jumping into it. Nine times out of ten, that's the value proposition. Most of the time it isn't performance, latency, a better/different data model, or anything of the sort.
Is there a use case for a dedicated social network for developers?
> To be fair, prop 25 was very astutely designed, with the simple majority budget on one hand and not paying legislators when the budget is late on the other hand.

What makes you think that legislators care about their pay? (Note that salaries are a small part of their govt income.)

Note that CA's balanced budget reqt doesn't mean that income equals outgo, that is, what the rest of us think that "balanced" means. CA's balanced budget reqt means that a model, which isn't tweaked when it fails to match reality, has equal income and outgo. It's accounting theater.
My vote goes for Wordpress.
I am not sure this is not out of control already.

In my opinion, there are too many sites under this umbrella and when I have a questions I am not sure where it shall be posted anymore.
Is The SEC Going To Destroy Angel Investing?
Here is what to check out when you are looking for what to read, and the blog associated with it is worth the read for insight and snarkiness: http://www.bookslut.com. Jessa is as compulsive a reader as you are likely to find, and publishes a monthly collection of unique reviews and essays. Highly recommended.
NoSQL Evaluation Guide (chart)
Yeah, it's better. But the reason I don't do those things is specifically because I think they're immoral. I can look at the impulse and say, "No, that's wrong." Do you think that makes me immoral?
That works. I think the key is having a solid introductory paragraph that explains what the product is, the tagline can only say so much.
What is the best way for a non-CS major to obtain credibility as a programmer?
He would have made a better argument by using ARM as an example of developing British IP and licensing it to others to manufacture.
I think it depends on the kind of person you are. Use what you have.

I'm the type that will routinely head off to a restaurant with only vague information about where it is or what its name is.

"It's probably down here, this seems like a street that would have mexican restaurants on it..."

"I've been there once before, and I remember it was on a block that was on the edge of a hill that sloped off toward the morning sun..."

It seems crazy, but the reason I end up doing this is because it works a surprising amount of the time. I end up getting there, somehow.

With work, I find that I end up relying on intuition the same way. The downside is that until I'm familiar with the problem space, I tend to be more unsure of myself than my rational peers. The upside is that once I learn the space, I can move more quickly with less information than they do.

Edit: Like others said below, the other downside is that this can sometimes lead to surprisingly bad results, especially in new and unfamiliar areas. I've been trying to exercise my logic muscles more recently to help with this.
Ask HN: Your development/deployment workflow
What do you do for web app/site deployment solution? Do you pull from a git repo, or use some less elegant version control? Do you test locally, or maintain a /dev/ folder on your remote machine? Just curious on what other hackers think the ideal setup is.
If anyone happens to be in the bay area and is interested in a meetup to sit down and learn repoze.bfg and the differences between pylons let me know. I think it would helpful to get a bunch of us Pylons users together and talk about it.
A jury also has the power to convict in disregard of the law given by the trial judge as many a black defendant in the south from around the end of the civil war through the mid 20th century found out.

The judge or a higher court can reverse a jury guilty verdict, so some such wrongly convicted defendants are spared, but most won't be so lucky. In most cases, there will be enough evidence offered to support conviction if the jury believes that evidence over the defendant's explanations, and so there is no way for the court to tell if the jury convicted because they felt the defendant was guilty, or if they convicted because they don't like the defendant's race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

The Framers understood this, which is why they didn't require juries to be told of the nullification power. No one has ever managed to come up with a way to tell juries of nullification without taking a great risk that juries will figure out that they can also go the other way and convict when the law doesn't support it. Not telling the jury about the nullification power is essentially the check on the nullification power.
Proposition 25, drafted by one of the state’s premier
pressure groups, the California Federation of Teachers,
sought to allow the legislature to pass a budget with
simple majorities instead of the current two-thirds
supermajority, which requires a degree of GOP support.
Naturally, it passed.

Well, that's not quite fair. I voted for it, if only for the belief that one party rule is much better than no party rule.
Hey it's great you got a name for them now!

You won't believe how many times I've been in a discussion about something and the other person has said "oh that's easy to do" or "it can be done in a few hours" when in fact if they were to go into the details, they would see the hiding devil...
>Nothing used to terrify me more than the question: “Well, what do you want to do with your life?”

Life is unpredictable, and this include careers. Thus a better question is:

"So, what have you been doing lately?"
Please fix the link. It is a bit disingenuous to link to the subsection fragment for Java when there's stuff above it.
I wonder when this was written. The earliest reference I found was June 1993 in an AUUG (Australian Unix Users Group) newsletter. http://books.google.com/books?id=lbsmK77EVU4C&lpg=PA1...

1) run lint: Not anymore. But then I'm a -Wall -Werr kind of guy and I visit Clang.

2) don't follow NULL: Well, obviously.

3) cast function arguments to the expected type: Not important now that the types are in the declarations. But if you don't force that, then yes. Got that right. Just as people got complacent with 32bit data and address, BANG!

4) declare return types for functions: That insanity has passed from practice.

5) check bounds: Yep, still causing exploits today.

6) check error codes: Yep, and triples is about right for library/system call intensive code. But the first time fclose() returns an error and you catch it you will be happy.

7) don't re-implement the library: Beating a modern C library is hard. But: if you have a special case, you can still get a significant gain by exploiting that, after you have profiled and know you aren't engaging in petty puffery. (It should be mentioned that the author is the Henry Spencer that wrote and distributed a regex library back in the days of ftp.)

8) use K&R brace styles: I care so little for brace styles I can't tell you which is K&R after writing hundreds of thousands of lines of C code.

9) external symbols must be unique in the first 6 characters: Ha ha! Good riddance SCO, the last system I met where that was an issue (in ar libraries only I think.)

10) all the world's a vax: s/VAX/x86/ e.g. I keep a PPC (byte order) and an ARM (char is unsigned) just to keep me honest on this.
I actually wish password fields would ALWAYS be visible by default on all mobile apps.
Neil, I'll phrase this in neutral terms, but have you considered that you might be neurotypical, prone to groupthink in defending irrational actions and cursed by the gift of little knowledge? I'm joking, but I do have trouble equating "neutral terms" with "horse's ass". I'd hate to see what your non-neutral terms look like!

Legion's post reads as very self-aware to me, and I think he (she?) sounds fairly aware of how society tends to react. His whole post is a response to this reaction. To me, he sounds to be looking for an audience that can rise above this. Thus you might be teaching your grandmother to suck eggs. Which might actually be a 'neutral term', since I've never understood it's origin. :)
I didn't say anything about legislators caring about their pay.

I think the pay thing in prop 25 was a smart way to write a proposition to get it passed, because many people were expressing unhappiness that legislators were getting paid while there was no budget, especially when many of the legislators were doing nothing about it.

In other words: if you'd split that proposition into the two different main things, it's likely neither would have passed.
I found it here, but I've seen it elsewhere (although neither one I would quote as a source in a scholarly paper): https://notes.utk.edu/Bio/greenberg.nsf/0/25f4f2f5e0cc667485...

Secondly, he did speak of the sacred very frequently in fact, especially later in life: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00....

Regardless, it's a good quote either way, don't you think?
When I see these sorts of things, I like to imagine that in 10 years we'll be playing Doom 3 run off Javascript in a browser.

You know, march of progress and all.
Jonah Lehrer dives deep into this his book, How We Decide. In an interview on the question, he answered -

"For the first time in human history, we can look inside our brain and see how we think. It turns out that we weren't engineered to be rational or logical or even particularly deliberate. Instead, our mind holds a messy network of different areas, many of which are involved with the production of emotion. Whenever we make a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even when we try to be reasonable and restrained, these emotional impulses secretly influence our judgment."

Put another way, there is no real bright-line divide between rational, intuitive and emotional. Rather they form a decision-making fabric and even when we believe we are deciding in an entirely rational manner, we're not.
This is exactly the pattern used by Rails apps with database migrations and Capistrano deployment.
I kind of stopped reading at the 50 dudes in 5 years part. She pretty much lost all credibility at that sentence.
There'd be a few things to think about: should the project already exist? If it exists, does the preexisting admin need to be involved with this crowd-source site? If it doesn't exist, should the submitter be the admin of the new project? Should submitters get their reputation from activity already performed on other sites?

Maybe a pledge system, where the submitter and pledgers agree to begin once a certain number of people pledge, and those pledges should be recorded to see if they're followed through. The site should aim to take a project from idea to completion. The submitter could set a number of roles that developers can choose to fulfill.

Even some crowd-sourced funding could work. Funding could be introduced or opened at some point, say from the beginning, but with activity picking up as a project progresses. Imagine Diaspora using the site.
This doesn't read like reporting or editorializing, it reads like sports-page-writing, the ugly mishmash of unholy love and a thesaurus.
Eating For Energy Recipes Ebook