skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> they are an odd fringe that is unlike most other people.

Not to mention that if government actually did evaporate they likely wouldn't be so happy with the end result.
I'm just impressed that my NaNoWriMo book, which consists of two words repeated over and over, has sold 19 copies.

http://www.amazon.com/Hipster-Posturing-ebook/product-review...
> It's the two-tap "upload to youtube/vimeo/facebook" that did them in.

Great point. For sharing, connecting to a computer via USB isn't nearly as nice as tapping a couple of buttons. (But Flip was easier to point and shoot. No hunting for the photo app, loading it, switching to video, etc.)

re: gadget axiom - I've also heard about the "pocket exception": Devices with many functions lose out to specialized devices - except when the device can fit in your pocket. (Sorry, can't find the source.)
I heard about Zaarly for the first time recently while reading up on the upcoming Startup Weekend KC. Very cool to see local startups getting some press.
You shouldn't confuse a simple affiliate scheme with multi level marketing which is an entirely different beast.
Just be careful when you do this. It's really easy to get lost and frustrated in an app that doesn't have a consistent tab bar at the bottom. The problem is that you can click a few things, forget the context of what you were doing, and not have an easy way give you some context (the selected tab) or start over.

That being said, Apple does use that structure in the iTunes app when you're playing a song. However, from that view you cannot push anymore view controllers: the back button will always take you back to a screen showing the tab bar.
"Could this mean that Java is a better platform than Rails for high scalability needs?"

Isn't this very much common knowledge for systems the size of Twitter?
Yeah, it sounds like they're trying to hijack the term to give the impression that other browsers are somehow not "native."

Did IE9 not have "native" HTML5, or is it just that marketing only came up with the idea now?
And, if that's their criteria for a web browser being "good", how would Safari on Mac OS X also not qualify?
Texas Instruments launches open source project supporting its wireless chips
Funny—when I was in high school, some guys in a youth group would call me "Salinger" because they couldn't or didn't want to remember or pronounce my last name ("Seli-ih-gurh"). And people chronically want to put an "n" in my last name ("Selinger").
Pagination comes to Google Docs
OK dokey, I'll put it on the queue.
Research of Homeopathy by Hahnemann Part 3
The Blue Marble Shot: Our First Complete Photograph of Earth
Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1733089

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799700
So say I have a first-order language (where functions are not values). You can write:

def foo(x): return x + 1

But not:

def bar(baz, x): return baz(x+1)

That is to say, you pass integers around ('x' above) as values, but not functions. In a minimal higher order language, like C, you can pass functions around like values. Ie: baz could be a pointer to a function in the second line above, which is called by bar.

Now, what happens when you have nested functions?

def foo():
def bar(y):
return y + 1
return bar

You can't do this in C, but conceptually that's not much different than just defining foo and bar as two separate top-level functions.

But what happens when the inner function refers to a local variable of the outer function?

def foo():
x = 1
def bar(y):
return x + 1
return bar

How does 'bar' know what 'x' is? You might ask, why would you want to do this? Well, say you have a function map(fun, list). Map takes a function and a list. It returns a list, each element of which is the value yielded by calling fun with an element in list. Eg:

def foo(x): return x + 1
map(foo, [1, 2, 3]) # -> [2, 3, 4]

Map can be defined as:

def map(fun, list):
result = []
foreach item in list:
result.append(fun(item))

So back to the example, you might want to write something like:

def foo(list):
x = some_calculation()
def bar(y): return x + y
return map(bar, list)

In other words, the function that you pass to map needs to know not just the current element of the list, but some other information that is held in a local variable in the parent function. This case is very common when using map as replacement for "for" loops (note how in a loop you can refer to the local variables of your function inside the body of the loop).

Now technically the name of the language feature that lets you capture the value of local variables in child functions is "lexically scoped lambda" or something along those lines. A closure is just the most common way to implement the language feature, but people often just use "closure" to refer to the language feature itself.

In a compiler that uses closures, the example above would be translated into code something like:

class _closure_bar:
this.x = Nil

def _closure_bar(x):
this.x = x

def operator() (y):
return this.x + y

def foo(list):
x = some_calculation()
bar = new _closure_bar(x)
return map(bar, list)

Instead of passing around a function as a function pointer like in C, you pass around a callable object whose members are the local variables of the parent function captured by the inner function, and which when called executes the body of the inner function.

Now, there is some additional complexity which occurs when an inner function modified the value of a local variable of an outer function. Languages like Python just disallow such modification, which is why people complain about Python not having "full lambdas". Languages like Common Lisp and Scheme add another indirection for local variables that are captured + assigned-to in an inner function.
Easier than teaching your grandparents how to use a computer.
Online game startup Tiny Speck raises $10.7M from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel
Fixed; thanks!
IE10: The IE team throws bricks in a glass house
I wish this was rated higher. I don't understand the fuss about "spaghetti code". Do all those people write spaghetti code in other languages? Because I see that not as a language failing but as sloppy programming.

What's so hard about this to get a sequential execution of functions/blocks, error'ing out on the first error:

async.waterfall(
[ function (callback) {
// do thing 1
callback();
}
, function (callback) {
// do thing 2
callback();
}
, function (callback) {
// do thing 3
callback();
}
]
, function (error) {
if (error) {
// ohnoes errors
}

// all done!
}
);
Maybe You’re Better Off Not Building Your Own Team
Many people use HN backwards from you. They first check the comments then decide if they want to read the article.

A one line summary or representative quote serves the same function a secondary title would in a newspaper or magazine article, or whatever those large, bold, extracted sentences are called in print articles. (Edit: they are called pull quotes.)

In this case the title, plus the source, plus this quote let's me know the tone article.
Pinpointing the Next Bubble
Ham satellite broadcast celebrates 1st manned space flight
Unfortunately, IE 10 is at least a year to two years away from any significant marketshare.
Здравословната Активиа
Активия помага за подобряване на стомашно чревния комфорт. Най - важното в началото на деня - здравословната закуска.
Glad to see that Microsoft isn't going to release IE9 and just sit on it. That is good for Windows users and good for the web.
Watch Manchester United vs Chelsea live HD | Online
Disagree? Like an opinion? Really? Are you a legal and HR expert? You are misguiding people here.
Criticizing Firefox for not rendering something correctly seems like throwing bricks in a glass house.

Also, I didn't see a Javascript benchmark in there.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
I'm not sure what you mean but in my experience college tests your ability to master a wide variety of skills and topics while work requires you to become really good at only a few. However, it's that mastery of the wide variety of skills that will help you be the person everyone else works for someday.

Some people don't need college, but there is a reason most people do.
The Humble Indie Bundle #3 (Frozenbyte) is now available.
1. True, this is harder in Haskell. More easily possible in a language like Agda.

2. The assurances you get in return are probably worth it.

3. I think that piece is unnecessary, and the type system will see that constructor is impossible. If it doesn't, it's a limitation of Haskell GADT's, and can be fixed. I don't think you ever resort to "Nil -> undefined" in Agda.
10^40 is a very big number. If my rough calculations are correct, even ignoring shifts in the decimal point, you're talking about a minimum of a hundred quadrillion billion years of computing time, assuming a hopelessly optimistic 1 cycle per iteration on a 3GHz processor.

10e40/3e9/86400/365/1e9~=1.4e14

Edit: though there aren't 10^40 possible 40-digit 64-bit IEEE-754 values (log10(2^64)~=19.27).
You misunderstood, retraction is not over money, it is over lack of interest as seen by the company because they see it is as you buying time so you can wait to hear back from someone else, and thus they feel like a second choice, making you high risk, after months of training you might take off. Now you guys can be naive about it, but this has happened not just to me but to other people too. Why do you think companies ask "So why do you want to work for this company?" To gauge passion first and domain expertise second. Someone not willing to sign the dotted line is like bombing this question big time. Like I said, you speak on opinions, and I am speaking of facts. As PG as noted on a few occasions, it is important to know what you know, and know what you don’t know, championing things you haven’t a clue about will kill you quicker than anything else. And yes, I have paperwork from lawyers and the original offer letter in my possession.
Flickr Founder raises $10 Million for new game called Glitch
I think it is a brilliant marketing term. yes they hijack the term "native" but if in fact they can deliver, it will be a clear differentiator in users' mind, like this:

IE10 = native = fast

Chrome = not native = slow

Simple message, and it works IMHO.

I'm watching MIX'11 live and so far the demos are great (like the fishbowl benchmark, completely blowing Chrome's fish out of the water ;D) but they are still just demos.
Off topic, but I really appreciate the layout of this site. Reordering the tweets to read from top-to-bottom makes it much easier for me to parse.
Yes, as far as there is a standard and no
I had to link to the #contribute anchor since it was seeing the main humblebundle.com link as a dupe of Humble Indie Bundle #2. Sorry about that.
What Are The 2 Most Important Traits in An Entrepreneur?
There was a bit of chatter recently about ill-configured nginx-fastcgi servers having a php vulnerability. Seems to be summed up here:

https://nealpoole.com/blog/2011/04/setting-up-php-fastcgi-an...

Thanks for the keep-alive tip. I missed that one.

EDIT: I see that the author of the post I linked replied below- also with the link.
I'm looking forward to lighter CSS.
Would be interesting to actually see the contract they are talking about. I'm sure one of them has a copy. While agreeing to a 50/50 deal in an email exchange may not hold water, a written contract between the two certainly would.
It's obviously not real work because you're just sitting at a computer.

This is what most people think. The only response to charge an absurd amount of money. If they shut up, you win, if they pay, you win.
Autodesk Brings AutoCad To Android Phones and Tablets
What if I'm mailing a friend because I don't like the item?
"Infographics" these days tend to have graphics so bad that it's hard to pull any information out of them.

This one was horrendous; it hurt my eyes and I immediately clicked "back".

There's an art and a science to presenting information well.

#include Tufte

Gathering a bunch of boring statistics and then "tying them together" with bad graphic design creates no value for anyone.
> Anything and everything can fail.

In my experience this is only true until you switch to a style where memory allocations (which are used in "anything and everything") are given to functions as arguments (from the top) rather than via malloc or such.

When allocations are given as arguments, the main reason for errors/failures disappears and a blissful ripple effect of failure-returning -> void-returning functions usually results.
Top Websites to learn about HTML5
Top Websites to learn about HTML5
thanks for the info! any chance we could communicate via email/facebook? my email is evan.c.owens@gmail.com. we're looking for some advisors/consultants with ticketing experience. thanks, e
Isn't that the way it should work? Asus is distributing GPL code they release it per GPL. Google released it to their customers (obviously or Asus wouldn't have been able to release it.) This whole tempest in a tea kettle is getting annoying.
As a high school dropout, I'm just going to go ahead and extrapolate.
Here's yet another stab at explaining closures using C. Hopefully this is clear.

The confusion about closures happens because it doesn't exist in other languages. (There isn't a way to express it.)

Let's look at a simple C function that uses a global variable:

int a = 1;

int a_plus_2() {
return 2 + a;
}

This always returns 2 more than "a". Initially it will return 3. If "a" is set to 5 at some point in the future, "a_plus_2" will then return 7. Simple. No closure here.

In Lisp, "a" would be called a "dynamic variable" because it changing its value affects all code that uses "a" over time, including usage within other scopes; "a" has a dynamic binding. But Lisp also has static binding which means the value of the variable is captured each time a scope is created and remains static over time within that scope.

Imagine a variation of C where variable make this distinction explicit by prefixing with with <dynamic> and <static>. <dynamic> would be the default and in fact is how the real C behaves. <static> now means Lisp notion of static binding (forget C's notion of static, which is totally different). Let's use it.

<static> int b = 1;

int b_plus_2() {
return 2 + b;
}

So here "b" is marked as static. When "b_plus_2" is defined at compile time, the current value of "b" is captured - statically bound - to its current value of 1. So "b_plus_2" will always return 3 _even if the global variable "b" is later modified.

b = 5; /* modifying b */

int new_b_plus_2 {
return 2 + b;
}

Calling "new_b_plus_2" return 7. No surprise here. The twist is that the original "b_plus_2" still returns 3. The value of "b" is captured in a closure. Each new scope encloses the current value of "b", binding its current value statically (unchanging) within that scope. Closures become interesting when the block in question is a function body.

So, yeah - it's a simple concept in the end. It's tricky because it doesn't exist many other languages. It provides a way to encapsulate state analogous to an object in OO languages [1].

The concept is more useful in Lisp with its higher order functions - functions that define other functions. This is very fluid in Lisp, while Python uses its lambda form for anonymous functions, Ruby has blocks and lambdas and...[2], and Java gets close with inner classes.

I hope this helps.

[1] "Objects are a poor man's closure" and "Closures are a poor man's object" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497801/closures-are-poor...

[2] I'm don't do Ruby - but's here's a ton of stuff on closures in Ruby: http://innig.net/software/ruby/closures-in-ruby.rb
How much equity should you give a non-technical co-founder?
You can also access a demo here without signing up: http://demo.runwaypm.com/session/demo
It's good that they will keep working on IE, but since they will only release these "previews" for a year, that means new features will always be way earlier in Chrome and Firefox (soon) with their fast release cycles. IE10 will launch with features that Chrome and Firefox will have 10 months before.
Wow, that graphic is impossibly hard to read.

Neat info, and I got a great neck workout swiveling my head around to read it all.
I'm curious as to why you think charisma is sometimes a negative influencer of success?
Agreed. Sphere sells vintage rules though: http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/sliderule.html
Browse jwz's XScreenSaver C source on GitHub
My first startup tried to answer this. Basically you take a secure hash of every email and store only the hash with a third party (which records the date, that's the monetization) -- but it's really really hard to sell companies on preventative technical solutions that involve math.

It works because you don't need to know which emails/files are important -- storing 250 bytes of hashes is practically free and tells you nothing about the contents, it just authenticates the contents later in court.
Thanks for the advice about signage. Did not know that.

My thoughts towards choosing the best and brightest is that higher education defined it one way (via grades, involvement etc). There is def opportunity to re-define it, but a difficult process none the less.
A person under 20 has a far better chance of making $100,000 in professional sports than getting it from the Thiel Foundation. I suspect that for a person under twenty, the odds of getting $100,000 from Thiel are even lower than the odds of winning the same amount in Texas Hold'em.

Not to mention that they also have a far better chance of getting an academic scholarship to an elite institution.
http://twitter.com/ioerror/status/57713368735289344

Truth is, you can never be sure your screening wasn't random

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/
Bushido: the future of hosting
"the industry’s first open platform as a service".

First? How is this different from Heroku and other such folks?
A bigger question might be, who sent it? Was it really the person you claim it is?

It's easy to show the receipt of an email and where it came from (especially when you have full headers). But unless the sender bothers to GPG or S/MIME sign the email, in theory, it could have been sent by another person who had access to the account. Or, it could have been spoofed, etc.
i'm quite surprised about john chambers resolve and speed of execution here. too bad for the 550.
Totally agree...
We're trying to figure out how to manage infographics... We've been contracting with infographic designers we think are good (based on their portfolios) and giving them a try, sometimes not having much success :(

It especially sucks because we give so much detail to every design at http://feefighters.com ... so it hurts when we put something like this out there which gets dissed on (though I totally agree with the design comments made here)

OPPORTUNITY: if you are a good infographic designer (will design things that won't hurt my head), please email me with samples!

Or- if you've had success with infographics, can you share tips?
Adobe Flash zero-day shows a Chinese connection
Set iPhone to SCAN
Its so native to win vista/7 that it does not support windows xp which Opera/Firefox/Chrome ALL support WITH their performance improvements AND they've done so while staying ahead of IE9.

I guess if that's native, yes IE9 wins. I think in user's minds: if its built for MY operating system specifically its better than the other. However thats not true as even the tech unsavvy are flocking away from IE.

HOWEVER. I am glad to hear this news. It only means one thing. PROGRESS.
1.0.0 nginx is really more like a version 10.0, this thing is a real pleasure to use.
Text is too small to comfortably read at normal zoom too.
As has been said many times before, this is not really a knock against Rails. It's what allowed them to even get to the point where they need massive rearchitecting.
Top 5 Safe Search Engines for Kids
inPulse (YC W11) smartwatch hackathon on Apr 17 in Mountain View
Are you fucking serious?
First of all, the guy is Swedish.
Second of all, he made like two mistakes.

If he made so many mistakes the meaning of the post was lost, maybe your pedantry would be relevant. However, in this case, all you've done is wasted everyone's time and now we're discussing minute grammatical points in a writing-unrelated post.

And I thought I was a grammar Nazi.
Maps aren't easy
Perpetuating this misleading meme: flagged.
"I never publish my code. Ever. Users get to give me feedback, but I don't care what other programmers think. Sure, I learn from them, but never in the context of reviewing the code I wrote. I learn from the code of others and apply those lessons to my own work."

You can, of course, do whatever you want but this seems awfully selfish... Essentially saying that you will take whatever others (foolishly?) give in open source, blog posts, etc., etc., but never give back. Am I reading this correctly?
> "Why doesn't Thiel make it possible for anyone who wants to go to Harvard to be able to do it?" Maneker wonders.

What makes Harvard Harvard is that not anyone can go there. If everyone could, it would just be a good state school, and that certainly wouldn't pay the bills.

What universities don't realize, is that the same force which drove more and more people to attend college at the beginning of the information age, is also tearing down the requirement for college. There is really very little that you can't learn or even experience on your own these days to give yourself a brilliant education.

That said, a good college is still far and away the best way to learn classical knowledge quickly. I am very thankful for my CS degree, because there's no way I would have gotten that breadth of exposure to the most interesting parts of CS with 4 years in industry, but with the way tuition is increasing, the cost is squeezing out the benefit for more and more people, masked only by the availability of government loans, and throwing people into a life of indentured servitude.

I don't know if Thiel is doing these kids a favor, but it's certainly no worse than the deal they'll get from the establishment. I'm glad he's throwing a wrench in the works regardless of how misguided he may be.
Why? One of my big problems with society these days is that honesty often doesn't appear to pay.
Upside of successful coverup: Facebook saves billions.
Downside of failed coverup: Facebook loses billions.
Downside of being honest: Facebook loses about the same amount of billions as if they failed at a coverup.
Came here to say the same thing. God damn that was bad.
It may be legal for a US citizen to be a nazi, but it also is one of those questions on the entry questionnaire that indicates that the immigration authorities are interested in whether you are.
Is the development time an essential aspect of this submission? If not, can we dispense with the "My <dev time> project" type titles?
What job site(s) do you recommend for keeping up with market salaries?
IE10 and Windows running on ARM
Your Luck Surface Area
> A person under 20 has a far better chance of making $100,000 in professional sports than getting it from the Thiel Foundation.

Statistically, not individually :)
I've no idea what was in your ugly pink and black textbook, but I'd have thought those trigonometric formulae would include lots of things like cos(A+B) = cos(A)cos(B) - sin(A)sin(B). How do you "reduce that to a ratio using the SOHCAHTOA principle"? By drawing a diagram with two right-angled triangles stuck together and doing the relevant fiddly geometry? That seems like vastly more trouble than remembering the formula. (It took me a minute to work out how to derive the formula at all that way, and I'm a pro.)
PS1 sold well into the life of the PS2 though. There will always be a need for more power in gaming, I beleive because the peripherals will need that power.
PG will be dropping by near the end to check out your best hacks! We'll be providing watches to hack on, inPulse engineers to answer your questions and burgers.

Please RSVP at http://hackinPulse.eventbrite.com