skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right that is the big one that I have been explaining to people when asked. The secret under the covers is mobile and Oracle's dead set position on that platform. The are doing everything in their power to eliminate all non-Oracle run times from mobile devices. With mobile expected to be the dominate platform in 18 months and it's relative immaturity when compared to other older platforms, there is a huge potential for revenue to anyone who can become the Microsoft of mobile.

Now the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that Oracle is eliminating the VM's on mobile not because they have competency there (Ellison is smart enough know it would be a forgone battle to try to now edge in between IOS and Android) but rather to clear the market for a sympathetic partner that will split the purse. And I think that partner is none other than Apple.

I find the timing of Apple relinquishing the JDK back to Oracle timely and suspicious further both Steve and Larry know that the other has significant competencies is separate, independent, non-overlapping, but complementary markets. If the mobile market it seceded to a closed vertical vendor they are free to chose who become the infrastructure to support the new global mobile network. I think the land has already been divided up and now it is just time to play the battle out.
It's even more insulting when they are used just to fill some Excel sheets and monitoring logs.
>> A down-vote!
> Your first I gather :) ?

<grin> You know me better than that.

I just always find it frustrating when I submit something or say something that I genuinely believe adds value to the site, and then it gets down-voted with no explanation. A down-vote will make me re-evaluate the information content, and sometimes I will, upon reflection, delete a comment. If it was content-less then I'll move on, but if I thought there was content, I'll try to rephrase and be clearer and more positive.

But when I think a comment has value and yet it gets a down-vote with no explanation, I find that frustrating.

It happens, I know, and it's no big deal, but I value the opportunity to learn.

> Fixed.

Thanks, although it doesn't explain why someone thought it was worth the down-vote in the first place. <fx: sigh> Never mind, moving on ...
A "Patent Stimulus" to End the Recession?
As The World Searched: Google Zeitgeist 2010 [video]
... if you think that that sounds 'ghastly,' I won't bother to tell you Anon's _real_ name for women. 'femanon' is a neologism.

Regardless, to actually reply to your post, you didn't get downmodded because 'questioning homogenization.' It's because you didn't actually question it: you only said two words. Your edit is much better.

Secondly, this is much deeper than 'fighting sexism,' and Anonymous isn't really out to actually destroy gender... There are, however, many groups that _are_ explicitly about destroying the concept of gender. Anarcha-feminists, people who identify as 'genderqueer,' and... well, even boring old vanilla me, for example. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Or a boy. or a girl. It's much better that way.
Consider his bias, though. Carmack's ideal world is one where everyone has one console, one phone, and one PC. Android offers him nothing but extra pain over the possibility of every human being carrying an iOS device.

What's good for Carmack isn't good for everyone else.
That would be a great argument, if eliminating removable thumbdrives and media would in any way impede internal communications. No business communication is done on removable media in these places.

That would never be a good idea for a host of reasons (remember the lost laptop with personal info on it? other than leaking there are lots of reasons this is a bad idea)

This ban prevents the people who work in the government offices from bringing in music CDs and pictures on a thumb drive. Recall Pfc Manning was pretending to play Lady Gaga on a CD when he was burning all this stuff onto disk. That's it. There is no other reason to use removable stuff at work except to leak or bring in files like that.

I'm actually shocked this specific ban took so long. The contractor I work for banned CDs (burned or not) after the Sony rootkit incident, flash or floppy drives have been banned forever.
Local SEM Has Changed, Have You Noticed?
I know. One thing you can do to combat this is to revisit discussions after they've died down and check out the negative comments, see if there were any 'drive-by's' that could do with a re-balancing of the force.
I think you're really being optimistic if you expect any kind of insightful geopolitical analysis or even recognition from the Anon army. I doubt 99% of them even know what they're looking for in these cables.
It's too bad videos of police infiltrators trying to rouse peaceful protestors to violence don't get more airtime.
Great ideas! Will work with them next I sit to write. Thanks, early adopter :P
How will you Boost Effectiveness in 2011?
Presenting the essential characteristics for effectiveness in knowledge work.
I'm still learning Scala and expect that to be a good investment for a few years to come

First let me disclaimer that this is totally my perspective on the subject but as a decision maker in a company that is now looking to move on and believes that this is the fatal shot to Java, I wanted to say that for us we feel that with the JVM shenanigans that any technology that runs on the JVM is in danger of Oracle's legal reach. After kicking this one around a lot among our peers we are hopeful that a language that run on the LLVM makes it to the forefront as a replacement.
Now That You’re An Entrepreneur…
So? Exceptions are still not supposed to be used like that.
Unladen has never intended to remove the GIL - their primary goal was to keep compatibility with C extensions without even recompiling IIRC (google seems to rely a lot on python extension around their infrastructure), and removing the GIL will break many, many extensions: the only known way to remove the GIL without cause a huge slow down is to remove reference counting, which C extensions rely on, and also most C extensions rely on the fact they don't need to be reentrant.
It's nice, but the problem is the ASCII art is, imho, even harder to generate than the flowcharts.

My advice would be to add an option to take formatted lists, sequences, text, etc. and change those into flowcharts. There you'd have a winner.

(Kind of like the new and super cool smart charts in Office)
How Caviar Turned Out To Be Halal [pdf]
The Treadpad
I'm traditionally published (Crown & Portfolio), but I've also spent a lot of time researching the options available for self-publishing and promoting. A few thoughts...

1. EBook or print + eBoook - If you are open to starting out with an ebook only, options get a lot bigger. I'd move beyond Lulu.com and look at http://www.smashwords.com/ and http://www.fastpencil.com// as fast, very affordable alternatives who can also help get your ebook listed at major online sellers. FastPencil can also help with book design and packaging and I believe they can do print books as well.

2. Cover/Jacket Design - Depending how serious you are and what genre the books are in, the cover can become hugely important. Cover design can cost anywhere from a few hundred to thousands, depending on the quality of the designer. I'd do two things. First, just google "book cover designer" or "book jacket design" and you'll find the sites of a bunch of designers with portfolios. Second, go to the bookstore and write down the names of the jacket designers for the books that really jump out at you, then search for them online. You can usually find their names in small print on the bottom of the inside fold of the back cover. Many are findable and will freelance.

3. If You Build It...They'll Rarely Come - Writing the book first, then figuring out you're going to market it after it's done is a giant mistake. Start building your platform, if you haven't already NOW! There is nothing more important (beyond writing a phenomenal book) in making your book succeed than having already developed relationships with a sizable, rabid community of potential readers and second-wave influencers who line up to not only buy your books when they come out, but champion them.

At a bare minimum, for authors these days, that should include a blog, FB fan page, twitter and potentially a 4th community that is topic relevant. And, yes, this is still mandatory for fiction writers today as well. You just have to go about sharing in a different way.

I spent nearly two years just building my online platform before my first book was published, then piled on a bunch of more tactical launch strategies in the months leading to publication. But, truth is, in the end, even that's just kindling designed to build enough momentum to get your book to tip into a word of mouth phenomenon. And, for that to happen, you've also got to write or hire someone capable of writing a fantastic book.

Hope that helps!
Oh, great, another way for the rails nazies here at work to make fun of php... -_-U
seconded! works great together:

(setq ditaa-cmd "java -jar ~/.emacs.d/ditaa0_9.jar")
(defun ditaa-generate ()
(interactive)
(shell-command
(concat ditaa-cmd " -o -r " buffer-file-name))
(find-file (concat (file-name-sans-extension buffer-file-name) ".png")))
For a challenge, play Gomoku (large Go board, 5 in a row, column or across)

http://www.playok.com/en/gomoku/
Based on my experience in these kind of places, the IT procedures are a bit more robust than your average company and your scenario wouldn't really happen.

And not being connected to the network would be the only reason you need removable media. If your computer is not connected to the network, it isn't very useful. Barely anything is stored locally, the risk of someone walking off with the harddrive is too high.
blocking connections to gmail works ok. Of course, that doesn't prevent you printing stuff out...
Have the respect of correctly spelling the name of the application you're linking to.

s/ditta/ditaa/
Google 2010 Zeitgeist
Have you read principia mathematica?
Lego Antikythera Mechanism (video)
Ok, wait. Time out.
What whould be the difference between:

try{
some ifs
...
return x
...
more ifs
...
throw
...
return y
}catch{
handle exceptions
}finally{
do_something_finally()
}

and

try{
some ifs
...
return x
...
more ifs
...
throw
...
return y
}catch{
handle exceptions
}
do_something_finally()

I'm missing something, I'm not?
A very interesting and useful post. It sounds like this guy wanted to keep some sort of reputation since he was so famous.

But it was confusing to read because it took me a long time and a lot of puzzling to figure out all the antecedents. It might be more accessible if you made up names for people instead of saying "this individual" and so on. Also, I would be interested in quotes or paraphrases from this guy's Twitter comments about you - do you remember any of them?
Although how does this explain the Nexus S, which is using an embedded 16G flash chip instead of an SD card? Are there equivalent wear-leveling algorithms included with modern flash controllers?
That control and communication are correlated is one of reasons why feudalism became so 'popular' after the fall of the Roman empire.
Yes, making any assumption on the basic types in C is very dangerous for portability. That's why you should use typedef'd typed such as uint8_t and friends (defined in stdint.h in C99, but easy to roll your own) instead of 'char'.
(except in cases where you don't care about the signedness or memory size)
Robert Constable gave a talk at the recent Principia Mathematica anniversary symposium [1] about its impact on computer science; the text is available online. [2] (There was a recent thread on all this. [3])

[1] http://www.srcf.ucam.org/principia/

[2] http://www.srcf.ucam.org/principia/files/rc.pdf

[3] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1941966
Microsoft's Bing now has shopping mall maps
Can you specify exactly what you mean by ALF? Wikipedia turns up both the Arab Liberation Front and the Afar Liberation Front, both of which mention leaders.
Camera's are banned obviously, including on cell phones.

Though if your point is that someone can always leak, that surely is true. There are thousands and thousands of people with the classified information stored in their brains walking around in public all the time, and they choose not to talk about it. Really nothing at all stops them from just blabbering on about it at the bar after work. People are the ultimate security hole.

All this is does is prevent mass dumps like Pfc Manning did (alright, is accused of doing). He didn't read all of those papers he leaked, he just dumped them on a flash drive and walked out.
Obviously you have a limited interpretation for the word attack:

Amongst the others:

.. .to direct unfavorable criticism against; criticize
severely; argue with strongly: He attacked his opponent's
statement.

In fact your post is technically an attack suggesting no attacking. Still you feel justified to go around attacking?

Seriously - get over yourself - Do you really have nothing better to do than make comments like this?
Looks like a nicely executed product, I haven't tested it, but this is the feeling I get from visiting the site.

However, I think you might have two minor problems here:

1) Getting people on the site and let people know you exist. See rmah's suggstion above. Free accounts for bloggers is a good idea at this stage, but not enough.

2) Customer acquisition: Please tell me immediately _how much_ I am going to spend. I won't hook my twitter account with your app, I've come to know your site 10 seconds ago, I won't let you dive through my contacts. I don't even know if this is a paid or a free service. To me this is a enough to let me close the browser tab and look away.
what is wrong with exposing school students to the fact that a great author in his great book used stereotypes which are prohibited today? What is next? Removal of mentioning of racism from the history curriculum ? Looks like building of BNW step by step.
Cancun COP16 attendees fall for the “dihydrogen monoxide” petition
Following the terms of a license granted by the owner of the content is "simply a violation of copyright" now?
No, you're right. The code in the above example behaves differently than the finally version in the case where UNLOCK TABLE throws something.

This seems to be an example where the hack is preferred over the correct solution. The hack in this case is going to work almost all of the time.

I fail to see how throwing up an example of a hack is a good way to argue for or against a language feature. Generally speaking if the language is decent enough there is always a way to hack in some new semantics yourself (I'm looking at you, anonymous inner Java classes for closures), but language features allow you to compose and represent those semantics more elegantly. So, the argument shouldn't be "can we do this already with a hack" it should be "is this hack common enough that we should fix it."

The point the author is making is almost self-evidentally against his own conclusion: here's a common pattern that is broken, so we should not include this as a language feature???
Python is clearly described as an OOP programming language, yet, interestingly, it does not have key features often atteched to OOP: it has no enforced encapsulation, and inheritance plays a very minor role in designing python programs.

As Alan Kay described it, OOP should be about very late binding, messaging and state hiding/protection (http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...). That's completely different from most what people describe as OOP (by that definition, a statically typed language cannot be OOP). The notion of multiple algebra associated to objects mentioned by Stepanov was already considered before, so I don't buy that argument much. Also, as much as I admire in some perverse sense what the STL can do with C++, I don't think it is an example of a beautiful design - more advanced languages (dynamically and statically types) provide much nicer solutions to the same issue.
One side-effect of the duplicate-detection I do is that I re-read old discussions. That lets me up-vote older comments that I think deserve it. I've found some gems like that, which in part is why I continue the dup-detector activity "by hand" (in the main).

And thanks for the up-vote.
I think Wired is confused.

Classified computers are almost always disconnected from the internet. In fact I haven't seen a computer with the combination of internet connection and approval to access classified documents.

So yes, they are low bandwidth. But all of the classified computers are networked together. Recall Pfc Manning pulled the files from a database that he leaked.

The bandwidth between the classified network and the nonclassified network is almost always zero or extremely limited (or might have to go through a person who literally weeds through the files one at a time and could accurately be described as "low bandwidth").

So any time you are circumventing that protection using removable media you are breaking the protocol. Just look at Stuxnet for the reason why other that Wikileaks.
Bruce Berkowitz: The megamind of Miami
Sure, posts to HN (or, say, most such places) should probably point to the original source unless some value is added in the other site. I can see that some value is added to subscribers of that Posterous feed, however, since it means fewer links to follow and guarantees readable text. So, I am unconvinced that this is a problem with the Posterous community. The reposter is minimizing the effort to consume content for his followers. That the souece link is small is inconsequential--the entire quotation is explicitly formatted and hence immediately understood as such. All one has to do to see the original formatting, discussion, etc. is follow a link; maybe the Posterous user estimates that less than the weighted majority of his audience wants to visit the full site at the point of Posterous consumption. To criticize the use of what is really a feed aggregator for doing just that is a bit like criticizing evolution. Maybe the reposter decided that the content was important enough to reproduce in full to increase the odds of its consumption by his subscribers. Hell, I'll read Jessica Livingston's textual content in Posterous but rarely follow most links from gmail if just catching up on a mobile device. In fact, an arument might be made that a higher quality of content/traffic is achieved in the long run for Quora due to the ability of posts like this to dissemminate its content.

That said, I barely use Posterous, so a member of the "community" would be in a better position to comment (and maybe this has already occurred theough the upvoting of the parent), but I felt like the parent had some pretty harsh words which needed to be addressed due to their generality.

Are there some studies on short format content reproduction producing a net detriment (and no wisecracks about ehow)?
Why intelligent communities will always fail
Yes, the points he makes are typical beginner mistakes, or at least things that 20 years of programmer conventions have found a way around. Not really big problems of the language.

My biggest gripe with C is string handling. Although the extremely insecure functions have been slowly phased out (such as gets), zero-terminated strings are an attack on sanity.
Without the finally block, do_something_finally() will not be called if:

1. the try block returns

2. the catch block doesn't handle /all/ types of exceptions

The point of finally is that it's always, always, always executed.
Just wondering, did you miss the 'per year' part?

Box.net is in the same price range. It's a little bit cheaper if you're using more than the 350GB dropbox offer, but under 500GB, with four users or less. Extra users cost $180,- per year, compared to $125,- at dropbox.

I hadn't heard of sugarsync and just had a look, they offer a lot less storage (100GB for 3 users), and pricing for extra storage is a whopping $300,- per 100GB per year (contrast that to the dropbox offer of only $125,- per 100GB per year). Extra users are cheaper though, only $100,-.
Submitted recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1990493

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988818

For more Antikythera items see here:

http://searchyc.com/submissions/Antikythera?sort=by_date

There are lots of them, many including lengthy discussions.
According to the linked article, the second one will not run do_something_finall() since it is after the return statement. The second one however will...

Note, this does seem to be the case for javascript:

With finally
http://jsfiddle.net/J5Cjt/

Without finally
http://jsfiddle.net/C2vg7/
They should combine a flash drive with an RFID tag, the pc would need to make sure the RFID is present to use the flash drive, and if anyone tried to walk out with them they would set off an RFID detector.

Ok so who wants to charge the gov't $65 million+ for that? Throw encryption on it and charge $150 million.
The Mastery of Writing Critical Essay
Critical essays are common writing assignments. A critical essay can be assigned for literature or art coursework writing. As the objective of the critical essay is to provide a critical analysis of the subject being analyzed, students need to know how to write critical essays well.
Unfortunately, I think that this is all too common, especially in other (non-software) fields. There's almost no excuse for it (short of "the company went bankrupt the day of the interview and all hands were laid off")
Your first example will do_something_finally() before returning y and exiting the try-scope and method (unless an error has occurred). Your second example will return y without invoking do_something finally() (unless an error has occurred).

If an error occurs before "return y", both will behave equally.

Basically the finally-clause is guaranteed to be run always. This means that you can put your resource-cleanup logic there and know it will be invoked if errors occur or not, without the need to duplicate that logic within the catch-block.

Especially when the catch-block is set to rethrow (or just outright omitted) this saves the programmer a lot of time, code-duplication and makes the code more readable.

The reasons given for omitting it by the PHP team is factually incorrect and shows that they clearly don't understand how the feature is supposed to work. With that hindsight, it would be interesting to see how it would have been implemented if they had gone forward adding it instead of saying "no". It could have become a highly fascinating monster.
Animal Liberation Front
Can you explain? Did you miss the 'per year' part?

You're saying $50,- per month for 3-4 people is 'small business' and $65,- per month for 5 people is 'enterprise'? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Python for Android and Ruby for iOS are pretty realistic options.
Yeah, I'm completely lost at Dropbox's new price point when compared to Jungle Disk, which is just as, if not more flexible than Dropbox. Jungle Disk is a lot more user friendly than you're letting on to, I've used it both personally and in the workgroup edition.

5 users over the course of the year on Jungle Disk: $240
320Gb of storage on Jungledisk for a year: $576.
Total

I'm tempted to say these are non-competing products since you can just mount the cloud disk with Jungle Disk, but you need to sync with Dropbox, but you can do the same with Jungle Disk.
You seem to forget that people are getting seriously polarized over this issue, and with all the DDoSing and hacking going on I simply don't like that word "attacking" being used in this context.

The second part of my message was obviously not serious.