skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't speak for New York but the irony in California is that Political patisanship, almost universally considered a bad thing, is now our only hope. Because right now the Dems have all the power. The Republicans literally have no say now. So if California falls it will be the biggest repudiation of liberal ideas probably ever.

So without the rest of the countries help our only hope lies in the Democratic legislature being dedicated to their philosophy enough to make it succeed at all cost.
Each approach has liabilities that should be recognized. Intuitive decisions might "feel right" but there are so many cognitive biases that can make something intuitively appealing but surprisingly wrong. Analytical, rational approaches are likewise poor at developing creative solutions but is good at removing bias from reasoning by clearly stating every step.
Errr, going from 55k users to a million users inside of 15 days is still an impressive feat...
I use blank lines in my code if that's the standard where I work. If not, I grin and bear it. No point in going against whatever style predominates at a given office. But I'm always amazed when I see (often young) programmers trying to cram as much code as they can into a small space, as if the density of text makes it all the more impressive.
Ask HN: Please review my most recent side project (cost behavior analysis)
I made this web app because I found doing cost behavior analysis for my managerial accounting homework very tedious and relatively time-consuming.

Cost behavior analysis is the process of dividing a mixed cost into its variable and fixed components (math: Finding the slope and y-intercept of a line or "m" and "b" in the equation y = mx + b)

This app is written in Python on the Tornado framework and makes use of numpy, matplotlib, and MongoDB.

What can I do to make this app easier to use and more useful?

The app:
http://apps.charleshooper.net/cost-behavior-analysis/

Sample analysis of my power bills:
http://apps.charleshooper.net/cost-behavior-analysis/results/4cd58f4399fda52f44000000/
People who believe that they make all their decisions rationally are delusional.

I say this with confidence because there is a large amount of research showing that people make decisions with a good deal of input- if not entirely- from the non-conscious parts of their brain. In fact, there are some people that argue that our conscious brains don't make decisions at all, they merely rationalize it post facto. (This goes too far, for me)

The classic example of this are the split brain studies, where they would show one half of a person's brain a sign that said "stand up." The patient would stand up. Then they would ask the other half of the brain (the one that was capable of speaking; in most humans, only one half of the brain can) why they stood up, and they would be completely convinced it was because they wanted to get a drink or water, or go to the bathroom.

That said, I'm pretty much the most gung-ho person on reason I know. The reason for this is that, like someone mentioned on a blog post on here, intuition is not transferable. If someone wants to convince me of anything at all, they're going to have to make reasoned arguments, not emotional ones.
Your dissatisfaction may stem from expecting this article to be a self-help piece. But what it really is is a review of a book of scholarly essays.

You may find more satisfaction in the self-help section of your local library or bookstore, or maybe in the pages of Psychology Today rather than in The New Yorker.
Sometime in 2011 -- I'm honestly pretty flexible.
What's wrong with java generics: erasure. "Cast everywhere" is still happening. And useful info is hidden: eg there is no access to generic type info via reflection. Another wrong thing: generics are incompatible with subtyping. (No co/contra-variance, to use the pointy headed terms)

Tail call optimization is not a mere optimization. A jvm cannot provide it and still provide conforming exception stack traces, for example.

As far as closures: you're missing out :)
ul.nav li a { float: left; line-height: 20px; padding: 0 10px; }
Caterina Fake Leaving Hunch
We recently hired our first remote employee and we've been experimenting with telepresence. Our conclusion is that it's slightly flaky but certainly ready for prime-time for a technically-oriented company like us. On our connection the picture quality isn't great (640x480), but good enough that it seems like the person is in the room. The audio is more important than video and it syncs perfectly with the person's lips moving which is extremely important. (That was the major problem when we tried it 3 years ago.)

There are two services that we use:

Vidyo is a pay-for service where you can either purchase a $7000 video conference router and use it as much as you want. Or go to a third party provider and pay ~3c/minute. But for 1-on-1 calls we use Skype--the quality is the same and it's free.

One of the keys to having a good experience is to buy a good speakerphone. We use the USB Phoenix Duet (~$130). If you rely on the camera's phone it greatly detracts from the experience.

http://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Audio-Mt202-Duet-Speakerpho/

The camera doesn't seem that important to the experience but we like Microsoft's LifeCam:

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-H5D-00001-LifeCam-Cinema/
New, yes.. but just 'out of the blue'.. I doubt it. A life long plumber is not going to suddenly intuit a better algorithm for full text search; but a dataminer in the accounting world might.

I agree that it can connect past experiences and solutions in new ways; that's obviously what it does, but my point is those past experiences and solutions have to exist already; it's literally what they are drawing from. If your brain categorized failures as 'solutions' due to irrational thinking, whatever you intuit from those 'solutions' is going to be a failure as well.

Struggling to explain why your gut feeling 'is right' when it pops into your head is normal and completely separate than being absolutely unable to make a good argument for it when people offer contradictory solutions.

Personally, when my intuition is ahead of my reasoning, yet I have a strong personal belief my intuition 'is right' I will often later, in a spontaneous way rationally link it all together in a sort of "ohh thats why it's like that."
Construction Time
From what I understand, there is no connection between the old application and the new one. So it's not as misleading as you portray.
The Perfect Stimulus: Bad Management
Dustin Moskovitz Is World’s Youngest Billionaire, Not Mark Zuckerberg
ninjas { visibility: hidden; }
> Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer

How much pain and misery could be avoided if hardware manufacturers would simply design computers so that memory location 0 was hard-wired to always contain a 0.

Sigh.
Lessons learned from on-line data storage and backup
Intuition represents all the reasoning that your brain does but which you aren't able to put into words. In many cases, that includes important information and heuristics which you would be ill advised to ignore. However, that also includes information and heuristics that may be incorrect; so if your intuition disagrees with your explicit reasoning, you should debug both to figure out which one's wrong and how.
I think that is in some way flawed.

For instance, it's possible to mathematically prove in some cases that one algorithm is better than another; a set of ten nested for loops simply has greater time complexity than one. You don't need to actually test which algorithm is better.

And secondly, your intuition can be bad, but it's not guaranteed to be wrong, either. If you're a very experienced developer you might have a feeling about what's a more efficient way to code something up that could be in general, correct. Not every decision you make needs to be tested.

However, there is absolutely no point in arguing whose algorithm is better if there IS an argument about it since it can be tested easily. Also, if you personally are not sure which approach is better, test it.

And finally, you're actually in luck if you have two algorithms that you can test and find the better one. That's an easy situation to deal with. It's actually much harder if you only have one algorithm and it's a slow memory hog. Testing is only as good as the options you give it.

(On a related note, this is especially important to remember in science, too- testing hypotheses is only as good as the hypotheses you come up with to test. There could always be a correct hypothesis out there and you never even conceived of)
Hint: The company that aquired Sun is Oracle. They have a proven track record for monetizing stuff.
I'm not sure I see the distinction. If following your intuition leads to better results than a more explicitly analytical method, then obviously the rational thing to do is to place more weight on your intuition. If "rationality" systematically underperforms an "irrational" approach, then your definitions are exactly backwards.
What the article is trying to say is that Britain is once again leading the world thanks to the far sighted, determined and wise leadership of the Conservative Party.

It's a little comical considering that Germany, Switzerland and many others are much further along the way towards a knowledge driven re-emergence of manufacturing that doesn't depend on cheap labour.

Britain is a glorified hedge fund with no manufacturing to speak of.
No. I also write pre-minified code. Whitespace is for amateurs.
Pitch the dream, not the job
Sorry rick_2047, I assumed you were an American citizen.

Most our contributors are American citizens but I forget how many international HNers there are.
So create one.
Saving Private Windows
Great job guys. This one nails the point that if you make an awesome service, people _will_ flock to it. Who expected an IM service to become a verb so soon? (Reference: I am just reading few Twitter messages http://twitter.com/search?q=kik and they all typing in - 'kik, IM, DM or email me'). This is fantastic. Good luck!
Also tail call optimization changes the semantics of the language - it allows you to write code that would normally be incorrect
Htaccess Tricks and Tips
Wanting to make your own Uses This page is like asking "Why don't they let anybody publish an article in the New Yorker?" It is curated content.

However, there is nothing stopping you from publishing your own version on your own site. Or bribing with @waferbaby with yummy vegan treats.
I think the important thing is to be realistic about how much you can expect your non-technical users to do. Your job is to only give them access to the things it makes sense to let them touch. For example, in drupal, it's probably a bad idea to give them the ability to edit blocks, but you might let them use promos or panels. If there's something it's not realistic for your users to do, then either you have to take responsibility for doing it, or you have to exclude it from the site. Having said that, I'd recommend wordpress or drupal as they seem to be the cms's with the most active development around them.
Intuition, analysis, and testing are all ways that you can make predictions about future results. I hope you're not disputing this, but just arguing that a lot of people put too much weight on testing while undervaluing intuition and analysis?

If so, that's an interesting hypothesis. Is it true?
In theory, if I start feeling the need to break up a function body into logical blocks, it's time to refactor, so no, whitespace is not used except to keep functions apart from each other. In practice though, I probably dump everything in main() more often than not, so yeah, whitespace is used.
In my CSS and javascript, I use a couple blank lines to separate major sections of my sites, and a single blank line to separate widgets in a section, so that when I'm quickly scrolling through code, I can tell when I'm going from one widget or section to the next. In my HTML, I only put blank lines between major sections, and use comments like "end of superwidget area" to denote the ends of complex widget areas.

So when the code has an apparent structure, like the nested divs of HTML, I figure the lines are superfluous, as the fine structure is somewhat obvious, and I help myself with comments where it gets hairy. When the code is a big pile of CSS or javascript, without the obvious structure of HTML, a good spacing system really helps me keep tabs on where I am and quickly scroll to the section I'm looking for.
Deleting code is as difficult as the amount of other code that depends on it. It can be much, much harder than writing new code. For example, can you imagine removing a core shell command like grep? Practically impossible. Creating a new one--however hard--is still at least possible.
> Which is why I found the comments in her blog/tweet that I replied to a little puzzling, and made this post to address them.

I'm going to phrase this in neutral terms, because I believe you thought you were making a useful point, and are genuinely confused at the reaction. Has anyone suggested you might have Asperger's?

Here's the thing: people will judge you based on what you appear to be thinking about.

Let's say your next-door neighbor is black, and then you hear he suffered a beating from some white supremacist skinheads. So you write a post on a forum saying "You know, some black people are so caught up in their own identity of victimhood, they invite others to take advantage of them."

That might be a valid point, and maybe you aren't even intending to make the connection between what you said and what just happened. But by the standard principle of conversational relevance, people will assume that's what you meant. And the people around you are going to be outraged, because if you were able to react like that, it indicates, at best, that you had no emotional reaction to your neighbor being beaten. People who aren't aroused to defend victims are considered creepy and untrustworthy. It suggests you are indifferent to the attackers, or that you even identify with them.

So, just as you tried to offer neutral advice on staying safe in a dangerous world, let me offer you neutral advice on not sounding like a horse's ass. When someone in your community is victimized, their emotional state, as well as the safety of others in their situation, is supposed to be uppermost in your mind. Statements that show otherwise are interpreted as supporting the attackers, or perhaps suggest that you think the victim wasn't really part of your community or worthy of defending. So, if you want to make tangential comments, at least acknowledge the situation first.

Maybe people who are innocently commenting on whatever popped into their head shouldn't have to make such gestures to solidarity, but the reality is that they have to anyway.
I used Lightspeed C many years ago to write a plugin for Aldus PageMaker. I later used C++ to make Jprobe Threadalyzer, but the experience was very different.

So honestly, I do not think I know C in any non- trivial sense.
The bounty is nothing but a PR stunt - they might as well offer $50k, it's very unlikely anyone will ever claim it. The XBOX 360 and their official(ly licensed) peripherals are protected by TPM style infineon chips that do cryptographically secure mutual authentication and protocol encryption (as needed). These chips are very tamper resistant, requiring a state sponsored level of sophistication to physically remove private keys that are never exposed outside of the chip dye. Or an exposure of the original microsoft signing keys for the xbox project which are undoubtedly closely controlled and are never required to be exposed to 3rd party developers (except, perhaps, infineon).

The exposure of such keys or a process to avoid the use of them would be of significantly more value to software bootleggers, unlicensed peripheral manufacturers and homebrew folks than any amount of money this open source group is likely to offer. And they'd be requiring a fully functional driver for a set of complex hardware with no documentation on top of the cryptographic attack. Nobody on earth would do all that work to claim that bounty. Not to mention, defeating the protections would surely fall under the DMCA circumvention rules, meaning revealing the coders identity would open them up to significant legal risk.

While it's fun blame microsoft for their behavior, it should be noted that this kind of peripheral protection is becoming significantly more common. Among others, I'm under the impression that this style of on chip cryptographic protections drives the new class of "made for iPhone" officially licensed bluetooth enabled gadgets and certain other "made for iPhone" hardware. I'm unsure if they use as tamper proof a solution, but the intent is the same.
Which is why my comment includes:

this is incredible either way

I'm just saying there is a difference. 55,000 people instantly aware of your new product who used your old product is a massive boost compared to 0 people knowing about your product when you release it. Anyway this is a fruitless discussion, it's impressive, just different!
An intuitive decision making skill worth having is always based in reason.

We might not base those intuitive decisions on clear cut reasons (that guarantee results, 100%), but we base them on past experiences and observed phenomena (that increase the likelihood of the result, sometime even to 100%.)

If you are asking about an intuitive decision that is not based on any of the above, then your question is really, "Should I make random decisions?" Sure, just because something has a minute chance doesn't mean it won't happen. It might just work.
> For instance, it's possible to mathematically prove in some cases that one algorithm is better than another; a set of ten nested for loops simply has greater time complexity than one. You don't need to actually test which algorithm is better.

At the risk of being pedantic, I want to point out that it's not always so clear-cut. Take sorting, for example. Everybody knows that quicksort is quick; it says so right there in the name. It runs in O(n lg n) time with small constant factors. But for small arrays, or arrays which are mostly sorted already, you can do better by using insertion sort, which runs in O(n^2) time. Somewhere in the bowels of glibc is a highly-optimized quicksort which does exactly this: it drops down to insertion sort for subarrays of size 6 or less.

And don't even get me started on the effects of cache locality. The point is, sometimes intuition and analysis of algorithms can only go so far; at some point you've got to either test it or just call it "good enough" and think about something else.
Wow! you're right, that's awesome.

When I got done reading the "What hardware are you using?" section I laughed at the heading of the "What would be your dream setup?" section.
One small request. On iphone signup, don't have the password field in visible text.
My Phone(HTC Tattoo) still has 1.6, and it may never get an official update.
I don't think Apple would have made this decision based upon a simple assumption.

In any case, there's still a free JVM available.
Why wasn't this girl sent to jail? She tried to completely destroy somebody's life multiple times. That's about as bad as trying to shoot somebody in my opinion.
I think this conservative journal is trying to make a lot of something out of nothing and attacking areas (large coastal cities) that simply have always tended to go more Democrat.

I think this article (probably intentionally) misses the simple point that there's a lot of "get rid of the old" going on everywhere. This has everything to do with the economy (unemployment) and little to do with actual actions by the ousted politicians. Dissatisfaction with life leads to voting out incumbents, and the economy has been particularly terrible for particularly long now.

Federally (House, especially) that's meant a lot of Democrats have been voted out, because the Democrats have been in power.

In California, the combination of an ineffective Republican governor, 2/3rds requirement to pass a budget, and a block of hard-liner Republicans has been crippling California (with an overly polarized legislature), and that's what I think California voters were voting out. Absolute stupidity about implementing some of the emergency budget measures (so they cost instead of saved) really didn't help. In particular, Whitman sounded an awful lot like Schwarzenegger: conservative talking about running things like a business, but with no political experience, leading to making promises they have no idea how to keep. And, of course, voting for lowering the budget passing requirement to simple majority.

(To be fair, prop 25 was very astutely designed to pass, with the simple majority budget on one hand and not paying legislators when the budget is late on the other hand.)
Recommended:
http://www.zapreader.com/

Now that I'm used to it, I find I retain more this way than linear reading.
Congratulation to Kik. Great!

But I'm concern about this service and privacy. It uses same tactic as Buzz (which tactic I didn't like).

Here is my understanding - please correct me if I'm wrong:

First, Kik ties in a person's username with their email address. Kik then sorts through the person's addressbook to find potential friends. This is kinda privacy issue because a user may not want someone that is in their addressbook to know they have a Kik account. But other people (my stock broker, tax consultant) will because if they have your email address then they also have your Kik username without authorization or adding that person to your friends list.

Is there a way to disable the above approach - maybe to ask which people will see you on Kik?
That doesn't work if you expect struct or array at 0.

IMHO a better solution is to have a type system that has non-NULLable types, and/or use language that inserts NULL checks automatically (and optimizes them away where they're redundant).
Most programming languages ignore blank lines. One notable exception is Whitespace (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Whitespace_(p...
Very misleading title - in fact, the title has pretty much nothing to do with the article, besides the mention of DNA. Besides, junk DNA isn't junk, its just that we don't yet understand what it does.

Besides the HN submission title, the article itself was interesting to read.
Programmers.SE is intended for questions programmers have that are only indirectly related to programming. It allows many things that would be considered off-topic on stackoverflow.com.

See: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/3352
And: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/about
Oracle's JRockit is older than the OpenJDK. All they have announced is that their merging the two codebases, and that the next version of Oracle's proprietary JVM will be based off the result. In no way does that resemble a bait and switch.

"Messinger didn't explain how the premium JVM would differ to the free version, but the premium edition will likely see performance tuning and tie-ins to Oracle's middleware."

Explain to me how the free version is crippled?
What exactly do you think that would solve?
Ask HN: I'm having a hard time with my startup, have a few questions
Hi, Im the founder of TagChats.com,(registration optional) a chatsite startup where you select some tags from the grid, and the system will match you up with a stranger with similar tags - someone who you share interests with and then you can make new friends. The core idea is pretty simple really.
I founded this project becuase i realised there is hardly a good chatsite out there for meeting new friends, they are all overrun with trolls/ asl/ spam etc, and i just want to create something cool where people can meet new friends and enjoy themselves.<p>Now the problem, this site isn't very good if very few people are using it, and right now its a ghost town. Please, i really need your advice on how to push this to a critical mass. The few people who have come on the site and chatted with me say they love the concept but it isn't much fun with so few people. I hope you can take the time to advise me,<p>Thank for reading<p>Alex Muller