skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/comphelp/v8v101/ind...

IBM has it wrong too then. In each of the examples provided, they dont "make the variable in the calling frame actually point to an entirely new object"

What actually happens is that the object (or value) that is pointed to by the reference is changed. Specifically, if you took the addresses of a and b before the call, and then after the call, you would see that the addresses have not changed. It is the contents that have changed. This is what happens it C++ in all cases. The only difference between C++ and Java is that Java is always pass by reference for objects and always pass by value for primitives.

Pass-by-reference does not mean "I can change the variable in the caller to now point to a new object". It means, if I modify the properties of the parameter, it is modifying the same object that the variable references. In contrast, if you do this in C++:

class Foo; void bar( Foo x ) { x.value++; } void main() { Foo y(0); bar(y); }

You will discover that y's value remains 0. That is pass by value.

class Foo; void bar( Foo &x ) { x.value++; } void main() { Foo y(0); bar(y); }

This is pass by reference. y.value is now 1. So now if this is Java:

class Foo; void bar( Foo x ) { x.value++; } void main() { Foo y(0); bar(y); }

Then y.value is now 1 - just like the pass-by-reference case in C++. So either IBM has it wrong, or you have it wrong.
Excellent article! Reminds me of the adage "Success is a poor teacher" as a reminder that those that are always successful have little motivation to figure out the reasons for their success.
but... Rails doesn't scale.
Simple fix here.. allow the end user to choose (maybe default to not sending)
Timeline of Failed Predictions
Columbia warns students w/ interests in foreign jobs: don't link WikiLeaks
Jack Nicholson and Dick Cheney, in the buddy movie to end all buddy movies.
I do not know the name Bentley, and I have never heard the phrase "maximum sum subsequence", but given the context in the problem statement, I think I understand what was intended. Seems kinda silly to bring up this notion of "programming folklore".

I was once asked at a job about what OOP design patterns I knew. Design patterns are folklore (and mythology). At the time, I rattled off about three names to satisfy the interviewer, but nobody at my previous employer was busy memorizing names in a random popular book. I admitted as much. The employer hired me (probably not because of my lack of design pattern lingo). The term "design patterns" did not come up in my coursework because it was invented right after I graduated. ;) If a future employer asks me about design patterns, I will happily respond, "Design patterns reveal a language that lacks adequate abstraction features. I do not study design patterns, at least as defined by Fowler and company, because they have no justification in robust software design." Of course, folklore would have it that we should know this answer by now, so we see an example where even the accepted parts of "programming folklore" changes over time.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule (New Documentary)
This is a great post and at a great time of year. Remember there are many ways to pay forward and everyone loves the one who gives without expecting attention.
If you specifically want to sign up with Birch's Monkey Inferno, feel free to get in touch with me (bill@justin.tv) and I'll pass your contact details along - I know a couple of people who are involved.
You can also do a server-side svn copy to create a branch of trunk (which is relatively instantaneous), then use svn switch to selectively swap out the directories in your working copy relevant to your change. I usually wrap this up in small bash scripts at the root directory that "toggle" the switches. I call it "poor man's dvcs."
Asking someone on a date is not solely for one's own personal benefit. It's expected that the other party could benefit from the offer too.
I own an ecommerce business which is very reputable. My BBB rating is A+ and i can back up my legitimacy with other third-party rating sites like Google, Yahoo, Citysearch, Judy's Book, etc.. For some reason my site has been flagged as having 51/100 for Vendor Reliability, 53/100 for Privacy (we're PCI compliant - wtf) and 55/100 for Child Safety. All i can say is all three of these ratings are completely a joke. I have no idea how they came up with these ratings.

It is very easy to manipulate their so called 'Reputation Scorecard'. I have no 'trust' in a company that is so easy to manipulate ratings with.
Am I the only one who was struck by how much that exam looks like something produced by LaTeX?

http://bm98.posterous.com/did-they-have-latex-in-1869
Again?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730788

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1460895

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1222755

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199117

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1063198 <- This one, from 317 days ago, has comments.
Scrolling down those screenshots, I couldn't help but notice how many sites have big, square advertising banners (even if they're of the internal, 'Sign Up Now!' kind) on the mid-to-lower right hand side.

Is this based around some kind of science/statistical analysis?
Great tip on batching updates - I knew it was possible, but not so easy to do.
How to Improve Your Productivity With Emacs
Beautiful site, but did anyone else think the image of a naked person tied to a bed being whipped was a little overkill (its about halfway down the page)? Not sure why the devs needed to include that one.
Newspaper moves into coffee shop, invites citizens to contribute.
Aren't central trackers a bit out of style by now? I thought all the cool kids were using magnet links these days.
Most phones, especially HTC ones, have a ROM that's basically stock Android.
I am not familiar with the book or with this problem, but I thought the O(n) solution was immediately obvious. It's not unreasonable to ask interviewees questions like this. I wouldn't want to hire someone who can't write an efficient algorithm.
T-mobile just updated all myTouch, myTouch 3G to Android 2.2. Fortunately I have a myTouch 4G, but I feel comfortable that T-mobile will provide it with future updates.
My immediate thought: filming POV shots for superhero movies just got a whole lot cheaper.

Thought #2: it's only a matter of time before someone tries to use such a setup to kill someone using a small anti-personnel explosive delivered by such a device.
Just getting Pager Duty for 6 months for $17 is a good deal, if you need it. It'd be $72 normally (OK, $60 because they have a 30-day free trial thing).

Yeah, the absence of linkage is lame.

http://pagerduty.com/

http://kb.weebly.com/faq-pro.html

http://crowdbooster.com/

http://www.co2stats.com/
"When did getting a job become more about knowing a specific framework at not being an expert on the Java language"

When did getting a job become more about knowing a specific language and not being a good programmer?
Football match-fixing: How betting gives the game away
Her appearance suggests to me she's open to the suggestion of initiating a romantic relationship with someone suitable. If she acts in real life in a manner which reflects what her blog headline photos suggest about her, then I would expect her to get asked out a lot.

(That doesn't excuse any men from being douches about it, but if they're polite and take no for an answer then I don't see any problem)
http://torcache.com/torrent/76A36F1D11C72EB5663EEB4CF31E3513...

$ openssl enc -d -aes256 -in insurance.aes256 > out.dec

use ONION as password.

I didn't try it.
Certainly in most scientific fields it would be unusual to be an assistant professor with a career stretching back to the early 90s and have a publication list that sparse, but I suppose things must be different in medicine?
Out of curiousity, does any college / university actually have a course in "Computer History", or do we all pick it up on our own?
Comcast, Level3 and You
It's not clear from the promo description, but it's actually the Small plan that's included in the PagerDuty deal ($24/month).

EDIT: The description was updated, it's clear now. :)
A programmer who does no outside reading on his profession will be ill-equipped to do research when the need arises

I do outside reading, but I would be hard-pressed to make this claim. How is outside reading correlated to research ability? This is like saying, "If programmers are not playing a musical instrument outside of work, then it is obvious they do not have what it takes to think in patterns and perfect their skills."
I used BB FlashBack because it had great mix of easiness and features:
http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/bbflashback/home.aspx
How to Weather the Outsourcing Storm
Did Twitter predict Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales results?
I don't think it's the cost of the plane that is the limiting factor here.

You might be underestimating the difference between this type of R/C plane and a military-class drone like a Predator. One of the more difficult challenges to overcome is the range of the communication link between the pilot and the plane. This guy demonstrated a range of mile or so. For many of the kinds of military uses that would have the "big impact" you're talking about, the plane would need over-the-horizon range-- which as a practical matter would mean satellite-based comm. So basically you need satellite launch capability to support this kind of project. The cost of that would be a limiting factor.
Hold on a second.

It's not the case that the UK simply can't say what McKinnon would be charged with. He's under extradition demand after being indicted for specific crimes in a US civilian court, just like the vast commanding majority of everyone else the US prosecutes.

This "is he the same as Al Qaeda" thing is simply a smokescreen. He was indicted for a specific crime. Here's the indictment:

http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/cyberlaw/usmck1102njind.htm...

Can you find the references to "terrorism" or "espionage" in that indictment?

Or is the case being made here that we're demanding extradition under false pretenses, and that we're simply going to bait-and-switch the UK government and lock the guy up in a military brig? Because, fine, that's a viable argument for a message board, but I think making it requires surrendering some credibility: you can't cite that specific thing ever having happened before, and if that could be true, so could anything else about the US.
The Pentagon Papers case wasn't quite a free pass to publish anything you want, but more of a "government doesn't win by default" ruling. It doesn't mean the government can't win other cases involving other leaked info.
Electric Bus Prototype Combines 2 Battery Chemistries for Max Power & Range
Create a Nelson Mandela brand
I'm reminded of the scene in "The Lives of Others" where the Stasi typewriter guy is giving a presentation in which he details exactly what model and make of typewriter every writer and journalist in East Berlin uses.
In this case we're talking about crimes that were committed in the UK, and handing a mentally-ill person over to a foreign government where he has fuck-all chance of receiving a sentence that the UK would consider proportional to the offences.

The UK government does have a burden of responsibility to its citizens, even ones who have committed crimes.

But again. The guy was sat in his bedroom in the UK throughout the assumed criminal activity. From where I'm standing this fails even the 'reasonable suspicion' test unless the State Department is alleging that McKinnon somehow made a trip to the US that isn't currently in evidence to perform his attacks.
Screenium is great for capture (on the mac). For editing I use after effects. iMovie would probably work really well. The most important thing is sound and the font size / screen size. Preview it a bunch with fresh eyeballs.
Design patterns, at least as defined by Fowler and company, ... have no justification in robust software design.

I don't particularly venerate the concept of design patterns, nor would I bother asking about them during an interview. But could you justify this statement?
I think you make a point that’s over looked here.

As much as it’s PC to portray men and women as completely equal I think men who witness this behavior have a greater responsibility to step in. Our society has always defined “being a man” as taking on certain responsibilities and I think this is one of them.

Further I think every father should teach his sons that they have a responsibility to be protective of women. That means not just respecting them but stepping up and dealing with a jerk who thinks he doesn’t have to. That’s part of being a man in our society (or at least it should be IMHO)

I’m not saying women can’t do it too but I wouldn’t think less of a woman if they didn’t. I would think less of a man (and again I know how un-PC that sounds but it doesn’t make it less true)
Unfortunately, yes: http://stallman.org/extra/personal.html
Your AWS dashboard would be compromised if you waited until you were on the open wireless network to run the EC2 instance, but attackers would not be able to compromise the EC2 instance. Once the instance has been created you can't change the Key Pair. You also can only download the private key associated with the Key Pair once, which is right when you create it. But of course, an attacker could stop or terminate your instance if he gained access to your AWS dashboard.
I just did it from my iPad. It's hard to trace since my finger blocks what I'm looking at.
I'm sure you'll love it - I sure do. They also have an audio edition you get for free with your subscription, where they read every word of the issue. It fills my week of commuting better than anything else.
It doesn't matter what language a developer knows, they are all similar.

All procedural langs are pretty much the same. Functional langs are significantly different. Skill with applying OO concepts translates across languages pretty well, so long as you are cognizant of little differences which cause impedance mismatch. (Static method inheritance in Java vs. class methods in Smalltalk/Ruby.)

How many frameworks do I need to know?

One fewer than will fatigue you!
How Andrew Warner built an email list of 23 million subscribers
I wouldn't punish a candidate for not knowing the answer immediately, but I would expect a good programmer to be able to design algorithms with the requested performance characteristics given a reasonable amount of time.
I was not aware of this until right now. I suppose the script filters I have are preventing these pages to try to print themselves. I am sorry to request something which is bad for most of the users, my fault :-/
This reminds me of a recent conversation I recently had with a company in my area. They wanted to hire a PHP developer, I sent them my resume which included 10+ years of PHP experience as well as working with many different frameworks. However I was not not offered the job since I had not worked with Drupal for at least 2 to 3 years.

Hiring managers and head hunters need to take note of this article.
White (Light) vs. Black (Dark) Backgrounds: Health Effects
just going to give my counterexample of still personally preferring google to ddg.
Thanks. It's more the case I have the opportunity, as I'm in start-up mode again. However hard I tried to lay out a balanced case on my thought process I still expected a bit of a 'Why does he hate Microsoft?' reactions.

I'm living in a house Microsoft helped pay for, and as others have commented, the tools aren't really everything. I can enjoy ruby or python or anything else as I see the same patterns in them all.

In short, we live in interesting times and it's fun to explore if you get the chance.
Multiple versions running simultaneously is awesome. I wish Heroku offered that feature (hint).
OOP(in the hierarchical sense) is heavily blunted by the need for global mutable state in games. The game design often turns out to need to access anything, anywhere, at any time, so the natural move is towards a model more reminiscent of a relational database, with lots of indexing and denormalization. Subsequently the job of implementing game design is reduced to a lot of query statements; most of them are collision or "is-a" categorizations.

At the same time, there's some pressure to serialize large parts of the game, if possible, for two reasons - save games, and editing tools. This further encourages a more formal relational-type system(leading to the entity/component distinction), since a setup based around unstructured pointers is harder to cleanly serialize.
This argument suggests that it's impossible for someone "in their bedroom" in the UK to commit a crime that warrants a trial in the US. That's not how UK law works and it's not how US law works. Note that the UK is also a signatory to treaties with the rest of Europe that stipulate the same
thing as the US stipulates.

If that's what you believe, that's fine, but there's no middle ground for us to come to, no understanding for us to build here. I'm willing to entertain the issue of hardship (hardship is something taken into consideration in US sentencing, after all), but the idea that crimes are unreal or have special jurisdiction simply because they occur on computer networks is hard for me to even consider.

Meanwhile, the rest of your argument boils down to, "I believe the UK criminal justice system is so much better than the US criminal justice system that we shouldn't extradite there". Uh, ok. For over 100 years your country has been a signatory to a treaty that disregards any such belief.

Who's to say this is even a factually viable argument? The rights of the accused in the US and the UK are different. In particular, criminal defendents in the US are protected by the 5th Amendment (courts in the UK can make negative determinations based on your refusal to testify against yourself) and the 4th Amendment (the US has a formal presumption that searches are unreasonable unless shown otherwise). Sentencing in the UK may be more lenient for computer crime offenders, but McKinnon may also be easier to convict there.
To summarize, they are moving to a new office that is a coffee shop (complete with free wifi), library, and news room. People are invited to come in and take part in the whole newspaper process.

This is also a newspaper that recognizes the web as being their more valuable readership.

Seems like an interesting experiment to me, and I wonder how it will turn out.
Being an introvert doesn't preclude one from giving a good technical presentation. It's common practice in the academic/research world which is certainly full of introverts.

The assumption I'm making here is that of hiring for someone to work on technically challenging problems (ie. machine learning, computer vision, data analytics, large-scale systems design, etc . . . - the list isn't meant to be exhaustive). For those problems you need people with strong general and/or mathematical reasoning ability. If I was looking for a very junior coder I might skip the presentation step.

At the contract step there doesn't need to be any risk for the candidate - there's no reason he would need to leave his current employer during this phase. Of course there would have to be an incentive of some kind if he was hired - better salary, more interesting work, etc.
This corner case should not dictate all HN submissions.
Prince of Persia Movie Trailer
It was my understanding that this is one reason why Apple does some strange accounting and why there are fees to get your iPod Touch upgraded, but not your iPhone. Part of the price of the phone is set aside to pay for future updates. So, you're not just paying for an iPhone, but also for access to future versions of iOS (up to a certain point). So not only is there an App Store incentive to get your to upgrade your iPhone, you already paid them to do it.

It doesn't seem like other manufacturers do the same thing. This could explain part of why they take so long in upgrading Android versions.
I still don't get Factor and I have looked at it several times now. The last time all I learned was that it runs on a Squeak VM. One day....
●═♥ Dil Tu Bachcha Hai G ♥═●
Twitter would make a fine DNS actually.
Realistically, people 6 months into a 2-year contract are not going to buy a new phone just to get the latest OS. They're more likely to say "never again" and buy an iPhone when their contract is up.
Retail Hacking
I am sorry, but that's an absolutely ridiculous, irrational reason. Your system is, presumably, a large piece of complex technology. In order to understand how to circumvent it, a significant amount of time must be spent understanding what it does. Students that want to submit plagiarized documents are lazy, and if they would stoop so low as to plagiarize, they would never in a million years spend the time figuring out how to circumvent your system.
This is what I was referring to:

"Britain has also signed up to a controversial agreement with the United States government to fast-track suspects back to the US - even though some critics say the agreement is not adequately reciprocated."

-- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7312853.stm
>Her appearance suggests to me she's open to the suggestion of initiating a romantic relationship with someone suitable.

And there it is: Pure sexism.

Knew you couldn't hold it in.

Edit: Just to prove the point. Find a picture of a man that you think qualifies as "His appearance suggests to me he's open to the suggestion of initiating a romantic relationship with someone suitable."
It's easier for the hiring managers to pass on you and wait for someone with 2 years' IT experience, all in Drupal. I'm not sure how you can pre-qualify yourself in a situation like this other than maybe showing them your portfolio.
Ask HN: How do you charge customers?
I'm in the process of launching a website but right now I have no idea of what I need to charge my customers. I initially thought of using BrainTree to process our payments but they don't serve customers outside the US.
I don't have any company established yet or any sort of bank account so I'd like to ask you for any relevant advice.

What kind of account do I need? Do I have to setup a company for this? Should I consider taking a trip to the US to start a company there (is this even possible)?
From Umair Haque: "this is what happens when you're in the business of hard-selling toxic, meaningless junk: hypercommoditization." http://twitter.com/umairh/status/10760981747601408
The point is you take steps to separate your business and personal details so that some percentage of your encounters will get the picture.

For those that don't, you should be able to deal with them quite candidly. If they persist and start harassing you then block their number or report them.

If you can't do this, then maybe the problem lies on your end. Stop putting yourself in the position where you are helplessly being tormented.
I agree with the skype praise in general. We use it in similar ways and it indeed does a a nice job most of the time.

What this article fails to mention, though, is Skype's absolutely atrocious handling of multiple concurrent clients (e.g. Desktop, Laptop and Phone, in parallel).

Once a second client is connected it's effectively undefined when and if portions of chat-histories and missed messages will be (re)sent. "Unreliable" would be an understatement here, as messages will come in at random times and in random order - and sometimes not at all.

I really wonder why the supposed #1 Business-Messenger is not fixing such a fundamental issue.
You can use that line of reasoning to believe in anything.

I haven't stopped paying attention, I'd like to know who's responsible for the DDoS attacks against wikileaks, but I don't see any evidence that the US government is responsible. Nor has DDoS ever been the modus operandi of government agents in the US.