skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The parent meant you _can_ do a lot more in a monoculture, not that having one automatically means higher civilization.

Your examples look a lot like shooting a straw man... if he had said monocultures always imply civilization, his argument would be dead right now.
It does not need to be that complicated :)

When a company I worked for was bought the new companies tried to lay of some (most) of the employees. At this time our team was working on a product that was to a large degree implemented in Scheme (because management didn't really care about the programming language). I quit at the company (for unrelated reasons) soon thereafter, but it seems that my colleague (with whom I've implemented the system) had quite a good job security at this time.
I've watched enough "programmers at play" and read enough code to happily believe that this guy was just letting his sense of humor have its day. I'm not at all convinced that things like this are deliberate obfuscation. Of course, I'm not the one who had to disentangle it all.

We've all read bad code with bad names that nonetheless "works" (except perhaps for the occasional minor glitch). This is perhaps just one that combines poor programming style with a mis-placed sense of humor.
> I appreciate it when people pay taxes because I like public transportation, fire safety, paved roads, bridges, public schools, police officers, health inspectors, safety inspectors, public parks, libraries, clean air, (relatively) fair corporations, airports, hospitals, court systems, electricity, vehicle regulation, elections, veteran associations, child support, public television...

I'll be sure to remember that every time the government raises taxes and pay up without asking any questions or being critical.
I get the sinking feeling that this site wold have experienced more success if it were to have just stayed a viral launch screen. Consider me disappointed.
How not to change mass behaviour: insult your audience in the headline, try to influence the lowest common denominator and ignore trend-setters, tell people to stop doing something they want to do without providing an alternative.

People who want to talk vacantly about an unfolding event will do so, and will not read articles like this. If social media adepts see a signal:noise problem, they know how to create new channels. That's the whole point of the internet.
A Nobel for Valor
Painless, ultra fast hot MySQL backups and restores with Percona's XtraBackup
This is a presentation created with https://github.com/schacon/showoff. You could add scroll or other bindings to the code, if you want.
Looks great. At the end of your video, youtube shows videos of competing products. You might want to get rid of that...
Unified communication for customer support management Full review of Teamsupport
Twitter should move to Oakland :-)
Skype’s New Palo Alto Offices
KDE 4.6.1 Almost Perfect
Thats like saying going to church is no help in a crisis. It helps people deal with the emotional toll of loss and a removal of a large part of meaning in their life. The exchange of thoughts and hopes for another are one of the most powerful ties that bind humanity.

Wouldn't the japanese largely be using kanji hashtags? This seems like faux outrage. I have a feeling given the vapidity of Lady Gaga's fan base that it would lead to more money going to the charity to sell bracelets than would be donated.

I see a lot of ads on that page isn't the author using a crisis to sell ads on his paper?
and how does one do this without appearing rude?
My experience of visiting there very much agrees with yours. I particularly remember walking down a dark ally in Kyoto one night, half way down the ally there's this brightly lit vending machine shining like a beacon, in perfect condition, not vandalised, not kicked in, not damaged in any way. I saw many similar examples of this respect for property throughout my time there. This left an impression on me because in my country, a beacon-like vending machine in the middle of a dark ally within a large city would last about one night.

There's certainly pros and cons to the Japanese culture, as with any culture I suppose. The attitude that displays its self in the preservation of the the vending machine is one of the pros. But along with it seems to comes an immensely strong pressure to conform and sacrifice. This is the country that produced the Kamikaze[1] and took ritual suicide almost to the level of an art form.

1. I visited the Chiran Peace Museum (http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/museums/chiran/inde...) while I was in Japan, I found it fascinating to learn of the history of the Kamikaze and see all the paraphernalia on show. I had only ever seen the classic footage of the Kamikaze flying into US ships. I did not know that they also had defensive Kamikaze who would protect Japanese cities by flying into enemy bombers and also small Kamikaze speed boats.
So, if the government removed those legal restrictions, do you think those industries would move to make their operations more safe, or less expensive for themselves in the short term?
I'd suggest caution in using WP for this. WP tends to get a lot of activity on current events (I usually don't bother editing them for that reason), this one is less likely to draw on the usual contentious/opinion driven contingent, but it is always a risk.

Quite a lot of "current event" incidents are badly covered on WP until some time after the fact.

Facts and figures could well be very wrong; with lengthy discussion on the talk page ironing it out. There is also a strong western bias in the writing/sources, especially (as it happens) with regards to Japan. Finally; people will tend to write their own interpretations and comment on such events; some of which hangs around longer than it should.

Use with care :)
>Of course, no real city has the authority to have a military.

To be fair, Singapore does have a Ministry of Defence and an Army.
Rebirth of DIY Software
The article did give some very clear suggestions:
- Give directly to the Red Cross instead of lady gaga
- Don't abuse hashtags in an emergency

Even back in the days of the CB Radio craze there were very specific rules for emergencies — if Twitter is going to evolve into something like that it will need a similar set of rules
A project I worked at during an internship had an unmanaged C++ portion for rendering complex typography, which was written when every letter in a variable cost $10 (or so it seems). The result was that "pointer to a metadata character" became the variable "pmc", and that was just the beginning of it. I never quite did understand what the variable lpmnoics meant, and debugging the C++ was quite the drag and the task everybody avoided, and pushed off to the original developer of that code (who happened to be in a different geographic location).
There's a discontinuity in desirability at 30, though.
Doing operator precedence in Antlr, which is generating LL(wildcard) parsers:

expr: mult ('+' mult)* ;
mult: atom ('*' atom)* ;
atom: INT | '(' expr ')' ;

Not much hackery there, just some look-ahead and recursion.

The grammar itself is context-free and LL(k) and the implementation is trivial once you understand what pushdown automatons are (automata theory, right after finite-state machines).
Is YouTube the Google business lab?
I would suggest that the Linux-y way to do this would be to pipe JSON between applications. The even-more-Linuxy-way would be to have an option to use YAML instead.
So you enjoy the four hour body?
I know I'm probably nitpicking, but there is a lot of difference between regulators probing the company and Apple being concerned about it. A lot of poking an probing is business as usual for companies as big as Apple.
One semester I was TA'ing a certain course all electrical and computer engineering students are required to take.

One student named all his variables in phonetic chinese (using the utf8 character set of course).

Another student named all his variables after superheros.
Why does it have to be a challenge? Some people are just jerks and they get their thrill from knowing that they've screwed up some people's journeys.
Again, I'd posit that given the facts available 3/12, it was the right conclusion.
My understanding was the same as yours above, but it seems that if there is a valuation event – an IPO, for example – then the rise in value of all shares is counted, not just the ones which were sold.

Separately, I do not think the tax is unfair. Tax has to come from somewhere, and if SF can show a nicer environment for employees and founders to live in, then they can charge a higher price for the environment. Tax competition takes care of testing whether this is a wise decision, and there is plenty of tax competition in the region surrounding SF.

To me, tax becomes unfair if it is arbitrarily applied to some people, but not to others, e.g. letting Twitter and Zynga off, while taxing other start-ups.
You would be wrong. For most atleast.
Donations are not an alternative to chatter though and charity hijacking is nothing new. 'Don't' is not an alternative to anything and 'abuse' is subjective, as is 'emergency' incidentally. #jan25 was many things to many people.

CB is bandwidth-limited and provides few options for resource discovery in comparison to the internet.

In case it's not clear, what I'm saying is that it's the responsibility of broadcasters, guerrilla or otherwise, to find effective uses for the communication tools at hand.
Slow Company movement
Good idea from Lucius Kwok of Felt Tip.
Error: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting ',' or ';' in /home/thehanso/public_html/index.php on line 24
Thanks for making some good points.

You've listed down 3 risks.

- Risk of no one watching.

- Risk of going over budget.

- Risk of actors or directors having a fall out. (Or something else occurring that makes episodes not coming out on time if at all.)

And you make a good point that thats why Netflix is trying with 1 show and not 10.

But aren't all these risks you listed further minimized by experimenting with a $10 million show than a $100 million show?

My thinking is: Netflix does not care about risk at all. If they wanted to minimize risk, they would have gone with lower priced shows. Or they would have gone with a lot more shows. The only reason they have gone after a high priced mainstream show is as a negotiation tactic. To make a stand against studios and cable companies. "Play ball with us. Because if we can't play together, we will compete together."
Lets see: genetic fallacy[1], circumstantial ad hominem[2], appeal to spite[3], and well-poisoning[4].

All in all, a very good compendium of logical fallacies, but as such, not a terribly good argument against the assertions made.

1:http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/genetic-fallacy.htm...

2:http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/circumstantial-ad-h...

3:http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-spite.htm...

4:http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/poisoning-the-well....
If only businesses were as simple to manage as leasing physical storage space.

It's not just City versus Company. Your employees are a factor in this, and employee decisions are based on lots of different variables.

Employees are the most perishable resource a company has. If my company told me they were moving my downtown Chicago office to the suburbs, I would start looking for a new job. I'd wager that half to 2/3rds of my office would not like an office move either, primarily because of the increase in commuting time and cost. (Hell, I would have to buy a car!)

Twitter and Zygna have an enormous investment in the talent of their employees. Many of them are likely to prefer working in SF rather than Brisbane. So they may play hardball with the City, but I'll bet they ultimately do what their employees want them to do.
True, but forking is also something which most languages running on top of Posix can do, that's not saying much.

What I really want and what is needed - a reference implementation written in 80% Ruby (or more). That's like Rubinius or Pypy, but adoption isn't great even though these virtual machines have shown better performance than the reference implementation for computational-heavy tasks.

And adoption isn't great because remarkable libraries written in native code won't run reliably or at all on top of them (e.g. Python's Scipy).

And JRuby shares the same problem, although it has the advantage of being able to use JVM-alternatives. But then you're stepping out of the Ruby ecosystem, which makes it a fork.

And to get back to "JRuby as reference implementation" ... it would be an even greater pain in the ass for alternative implementations, because C is more portable than Java.
You have to care to be embarrassed.

Imagine if this much effort had gone into 1.9.2 instead?
But you need tons of additional water if you deliver it with a helicopter.
Networking: The Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing
Ok, i should have tried it. It does not work with a declaration. However, this code compiles just fine:

int main(void) {
int select = 6, from = 2;
int x = {select * from};
printf("%d\n",x); // prints 12
return 0;
}

gcc and clang only complain the missing include for printf. cparser (which i'm working on) prints "warning: extra curly braces around scalar initializer".
I worked with a guy (I won't name the company) who wrote Java code in one, huge, static class as much as possible.
In fact, everything was largely in one function too.

He decided to name his fields alphabetically.

static int a

static int b

static String c

static float d

static int e...

What, I wondered, would happen when he ran out of letters?
Scrolling down further I saw this:

static int aa

static float ab

static String ac

static int ad...
There's even worse than abstractions that are used by their creator only: those that are not used by their creators at all.

I see that in my code all the time: my abstractions tend to suck until I use them myself, at which point I fix them.

The problem is, we often have to build abstractions that others will use before we use them ourselves. At that point we're kinda stuck, because the necessary changes will break code, and that's scary.
With the methods provided via HTTP.
I love little trinkets like this. Nice work. On a side note, I've been staring at the mouse on my desk for 2 minutes now, and it's still not moving.
My read from the article is that it's more akin to calling 911 during an emergency to tell the operators what a great job they're doing and that your thoughts are with them. Obviously a tweet has a much smaller impact, but multiply that behavior by tens of thousands of people it's not hard to imagine legitimate crisis messages scrolling out of view when someone finally gets signal and catches up on the last four hours of tweets.
> It seems that the IAEA is not a useful source of up-to-date information here.

From the agency's statute page (http://www.iaea.org/About/statute_text.html#A1.2):

> The Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world.

Now why would an Agency which is interested in "accelerating" the use of atomic energy for "prosperity" around the world say anything too negative about all this mess?
why pay for it when i can get it for free? LyX FTW!

TBH, i've never used framemaker and their site makes me want to give it a try. TODO: give it a try.
Thanks, i will try!
Maybe with proper code review these kinds of ridiculous problems would get caught early and stomped on rather than turning into actual problems.
You know what ?
Sometimes it can't be about the money, sometimes it's about what you can do for the community and the city you choose to have a business in, and the quality of living there. Why do most startups are located there and in cities nearby ?

I'm pretty sure Twitter wouldn't be twitter if they weren't in SF.

And this is what's scares me about this whole "bubble 2.0" thing. People (investors) are getting too greedy, they rather move an entire company, including reallocation of it's employees than to pay a fraction of their $xxB evaluation.

I don't give a damn about the investors, they knew where this companies was located. If they aren't informed before their investment, this just shows how much they know about their own country and cities.

Besides, you have no idea how much tax europeans startups have to pay, If there was a place like SF in Europe, I would be moving there tomorrow morning.

And finally, we are talking about Twitter. Have they finally got a way of making any real money ? Or this company based only on paper money ?
Thanks for all comments
Sounds like he got his start programming spreadsheets.
This is the crux of it. Either give them a free account (possibly with benefits to you described above) or stop them/lock them out. The chance of converting this customer into a valid one is low enough that it's not worth your mental overhead dealing with them further.
This book inspired me more than any other.
In the real world you probably wouldn't want to have a dob field on the unicorns table. Instead just use the timestamp embedded into the _id field.

Pretty good overall though.
Thanks so much for posting this. After HN users upvoted the original (and obviously discredited) post into the stratosphere, it is very sad to see posts like this one being ignored. In frustration, I posted this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2325730 .
I'd love something like this for either Javascript itself or Node.js - Any ideas anyone?
Another example of this: when I lived in Japan, I used to park (and lock) my bicycle at a very crowded station and leave it there for several hours. I locked the bicycle but sometimes left my coat in the basket. I continued this habit for several weeks, until finally I left my bicycle there over the weekend while going on a trip. When I came back, the coat was gone. The bicycle was still there, of course.

That said, the most likely and annoying thing to happen to your bicycle in Japan is that the parking police will steal it if you park near a crowded place (eg. any train station) and place it in some storage facility far away from where you live, where you then have to go by bus to pick up your bicycle and cycle home. This happened to me at least 3 times..
lpmoics

a long pointer to a meta object in cthulhu studies...

... see also Hungarian notation as implemented by Miskatonic University
Out of curiousity, what is a currently functional non-stone-age operating system?
Indian Festival of Holi 2011 wallpapers and photos
Holi is Gift of God.Holi is Indian Festival of India.The colorful festival of Holi is celebrated on 20th march 2011.Holi is mostly celebrated by Hindus but other religions in India also celebrate this festival because Holi is also the symbol of love.
It was only that way for a few hours, but the magnitude of the inaccuracy is important to keep in mind. No matter how good wikipedia gets it's always important to use critical reasoning to make sure what you're reading is actually reliable information.
Some Old printing machines for own printing press holders
While this is true, there's a lot of space in between a model developer and a purposely-obfuscating twit. There's definitely a line that lazy developers can walk where they contribute just enough to make firing them more of a pain than putting up with them. I suppose the lesson for businesses is: be very careful about who you hire in the first place, because you may end up stuck with the person whether you like it or not.
Code Like a Girl
For the Chinese guy, I wonder if the code would have been way easy to maintain for the average Chinese developer. That would be an interesting analysis.
Just-Eat secures $48M funding round from Greylock, Redpoint and Index Ventures
> SF is a nice place. People want to be there.

Exactly. I could count on two hands the number of places I'd be willing to live (unless you were paying me truly obscene amounts of money and doing incredibly interesting work). Proper cities with good public transport and fun things going on. In a country where I speak at least a bit of the language.

Quality of life is not something to be ignored; requiring employees to live elsewhere or make long commutes is a big deal. When you're a startup looking for younger employees and fostering that kind of culture, location is vitally important.
This is neat, 2008R2 actually lets you run Powershell on ServerCore (ie, you don't need a GUI on your server). You can set up an app called 'PowerShell server' and SSH in like a normal server.
total number of causalities of 35, all in Chernobyl

Wrong, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

- 31 dead from acute radiation poisoning within months
- 216 non-cancer deaths until 1998
- Between 9,000 (official government report) and 60,000 (TORCH report) cancer deaths overall
I agree. Tomato and Pizza aren't any less silly than Foo, Baz and Bar, and certainly much less offensive than Fubar...

... It's not just programmers that do this either, also network admins name their computers R2D2 and C3PO, Shodan, Skynet etc.
The original email is pretty much relationship management 101. Client Y asks for X, you observe that X is well outside your area of responsibility and not likely to happen, they ask you to make enquiries, so you email the relevant person and then diplomatically reword their response. We passed your feedback on to TechCrunch. TechCrunch were grateful for their invitation to your event and noted they had not been advised of any publishing restrictions. They observed the abrasive, sceptical tone of the article is their house journalistic style and that far from damaging readers' perceptions of your film, it is likely to have raised awareness of your film in a key target market. The editorial freedom of TechCrunch is very important to AOL.

I've sent emails along the lines of "X enquired whether their press release sent yesterday was newsworthy" and even "X has asked for [something] because [reason] and I am sure the answer will be no. Please confirm that that is the case" before.

I can perfectly understand TechCrunch's motivations for publishing: "Hey, we're standing up against AOL like we said we would. Now give us more pageviews", but only assume the rest of the chorus of hostility directed towards the carefully worded email emanates from people who don't have to deal with corporate customers on a daily basis, or can afford to tell them to jump off a bridge.
This story reminded me of the poor sod I met who coded for a government department: http://blog.jgc.org/2007/08/why-you-dont-want-to-code-for.ht...
In short: FUD by nuclear energy lobbyists.

Um... Kinda the opposite of FUD, wouldn't you say?
Hollywood hot actress
Also on TechCrunch, Paul Carr has written a really good rebuttal to Alexia's piece, pointing out that TechCrunch and Moviefone are two independent AOL properties, and it's no more fair to call some Moviefone flack "AOL" than it would be to refer to Alexia herself that way.

Then he demands the head of the Moviefone editor-in-chief on a platter for her response to Alexia's article.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/16/actually-aol-didnt-ask-us-t...
That sounds kind of funny. Where do you go on error?

One time I had to debug this incredibly obfuscated Word Basic subroutine. It was such a mess of gotos (deliberately so) that the company that wrote it for us thought they had us over a barrel and could charge us like a wounded bull.

That is, until I showed my cow-orkers the superior technology of "paper, scissors and sticky tape".
This is off topic but I find it difficult to read the blog-articles from jaquesmattheij.com . Zooming doesn't help because the text doesn't wrap correctly. Just a suggestion for the author to change the layout of the page.
Just-Eat closes $48m funding to scale globally
The only place where the names made any immediate sense was 'main' and any C stdlib calls.

Any job worth doing is worth doing right. Contrariwise, any job worth fucking up is worth fucking up stupendously. He didn't go all the way.

#define monkeymeat printf
#define turtlescrotum malloc
#define wolfnipplechips gets
#define chipotlaway exit
...