skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course it is, with the minor syntactic addition of callers passing in the memory location. References aren't a _necessary_ feature of function parameters and if the reference is going to be modified, a pointer is more clear and should be used.

But there is a utility in allowing references to exist in the language for overloaded operators, so you can overload a subscript in a collection and assign to it, such as

foo[x] = bar, where foo is a collection of bar objects.

They could have restricted references to just these sorts of use cases and when using foo[x] as an argument, require the user to type &foo[x], but once references are in the language allowing them as parameters seems like a reasonable enough decision to me.
There are two different philosophies of branches as near as I can make out.

* Branches as 'records of effort'/'who did what when on what project'.

* Separating lines of development to keep mainline builds from falling over.

In a 'audit-thy-process' environment, immutable history and records of projects have a high importance. If the goal is 'simply' to separate lines of development - well then you can squash commits and it doesn't matter.
For all values of n=pi?
I'm not sure why you think that. Unless you use spork or something that preloads the rails environment then forks it on every test run, autotest/watchr will boot the whole rails environment from scratch on each run.
They don't care about this. I have reported probably 20 pages that won't show you content unless you "like" them, and they are still up and I have never heard anything in response to my reports.
But that's not really different for any other drug.
Given how hard Google is working to earn the trust of businesses with regard to Google Apps, I highly doubt they would be stupid enough to risk getting caught spying on individual documents.
Nice infographic showing where and when job loss and creation is happening. Particularly stark visualization of the recession happening.
The senators who say linking to certain sites should be a felony
You can slow down the startup time for Django if you have lots of installed apps and nested modules but it is still in the order of seconds rather than tens of seconds.
Social-networking sites face new privacy battle
is it remote an option?
I think independent trials is not an obviously good assumption. Any properly designed major will have later courses build on earlier ones, so one might have predicted that performance in the first course was more predictive of GPA than SAT score (though this isn't the only model that would lead to such a prediction). I, for one, am surprised that it appears to be so independent.
Current trends of location-based social apps
Here's what perftools.rb gives me for a view-heavy page on 1.9.2-p180 with Rails 3:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6607107/dev.tanga.gif

46% of the time is spent garbage collecting.
I think it's about the Kinect and how Microsfot isn't suing the guys who made PC-drivers.
Chromebooks: Are they Overpriced?
Overview of preferred hosting choices of Y Combinator startups
Here's a Andrew Warner interview with Jay Meattle where he talks about how Shareaholic reached 2+ millions installs of their browser add-on: http://mixergy.com/shareaholic-jay-meattle-interview/
This is my content, I used bo.lt to post this on HN as an experiment.
"Choosed" Seriously? I "choosed" to not read this article.
Video: New ZeroTouch Interface is a Touchscreen Without the Screen
Who is making you uncomfortable?
19 errors to avoid in your use of the English language
Canadian researchers find cure for cancer
Ask HN: What do you think about this idea? It's called "Strtps"
Hey guys. So, I'm starting another startup (I have a problem). It is so intertwined into the startup community (wait until you hear the name), that I wanted to post the idea and plan for execution here.

It's called "Strtps". I've got http://strtps.com, and @strtps on Twitter.

The idea came from this: I'm desperate to learn node.js. I'm following along with the node tutorial (http://dailyjs.com/2010/11/01/node-tutorial/ ) but don't want to build another typical app. So I was thinking: wouldn't it be great to have a repository of startup ideas? Like, a place to go and find ideas of all shapes and sizes for starting a web-based app/business. I'm interested in smaller ideas, but some people might be interested in building an actual business around an app idea.

So, Strtps was born. It's going to be an "idea bank for startups". Folks can submit an "idea", as well as supporting information like traction, audience, market fit, monetization ideas, etc. Some people think their ideas are worth millions and won't want to share them in fear of someone "stealing" it, but I think most people are getting over that. Execution is where it's at.

There are a few resources for startup ideas already, notably YC (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html ) and Steve Poland (http://blog.stevepoland.com/100-web-start-up-business-ideas/ ), so I know not everyone is afraid of sharing ideas.

Strtps could be a place to find an interesting idea to work on, and find someone passionate about it who might want to co-found with you. The idea here is to connect great ideas with great executers. Right now we've got resources to get funded (http://angel.co ) and to get noticed (http://startupli.st and many others). We need a place to find and curate ideas, and find passionate people who want to work on it with you, revolving specifically around an idea.

So, back to the functionality. People submit ideas, then other folks browse ideas, and can "like" an idea, or say "I'm already working on this". No login needed for liking or saying "I'm working on it". The idea there is to simply guage the popularity of an idea.

Now, let's say you see an idea that you really like. For now, browsing the site will only reveal the title of an idea, the "pitch", "likes" and number of people working on it. You are closed off from knowing who owns each idea. If you want to see complete information on the idea (and all other ideas in the DB), you need to be a Pro member. Pro member accounts will cost $12/year, PayPal only. Once you're a Pro member, you can see all info on any idea, and you can also contact the owner of ideas. The point here is to garner serious entreprenuers, developers and designers when contacting an idea-man or woman.

And, a small feature - if you're a Pro member and you create an idea, you can make an idea completely public if you'd like, meaning you can make all the details of the idea available to the public (non-Pro members), as well as let non-Pro members contact you. Just a perk of being a Pro member.

Whew, a mouthful. What do you think?
Obligatory story from the Old New Thing: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/12/01/11847...
That's only 9 libraries, and that shouldn't be enough to cause your load times to reach 20-30 seconds.

Also, since you asked :-) I would question #5. Auto admin libraries (and this applies to multiple languages and frameworks) are generally heavy, too general and have code hidden away in the library. In contrast, banging out crud views and controllers in a locked-down namespace is easy, only relies on same dependencies as the rest of the app, can be customized for the specific business needs and all the code is in one obvious place.
What I've read of Jungian is pretty 'woo-woo' and does not lead to any sort of rational trust.

I'd rather go with statistics: statistically, 68% of people are pretty close to the rule, and 95% are fairly close. People are all pretty much the same wherever you go if you look past the superficial trappings.
Khan Academy has a great series on renting vs buying

Part 1
http://www.khanacademy.org/#/v/renting-vs--buying-a-home?p=F...

Part 2
http://www.khanacademy.org/#/v/renting-vs--buying-a-home--pa...

Detailed analysis
http://www.khanacademy.org/#/v/renting-vs--buying--detailed-...
> I should also point out that what is really relevant to success in a college course in physics or mathematics, even more than SAT score or some other IQ proxy, is specific subject matter background in science and mathematics.

But this is not meaningful without controlling for IQ. What allows you to achieve "subject matter background in science and mathematics"?

> the United States median achievement level is only at the bottom quartile level for those countries

And this is not meaningful without controlling for ethnicity. Disaggregated results show that Americans of European descent are competitive with Europeans, Americans of Asian descent competitive with East Asians, and so on.

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-ba...

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/badgering-the-w...

http://hackerne.ws/item?id=2463278

In the last link, yummyfajitas seems to have noted this particular point to you before.
Each morning the sun shines in my face, it's uncomfortable to keep sleeping like that so my schedule is surprisingly regular now. I used to sleep like you in my previous condo's.
I switched to VirtualBox a while back when I realized VB was Open Source and VMWare wasn't.
Bizarre Apple Design Choices
"That's not the dev server, which is able to start and reload pretty fast...That post is complaining about...a production problem."

The issue is actually that it takes time to load the application code and dependencies, something that applies to Django, Rails and just about any similar framework, regardless of whether it's the production or development environment. In general, the production environment will actually be faster at this.

Just to clarify the context to future readers, I deleted by post because I wasn't interested in discussing django, but since you responded I'm addressing it. My original post pointed out that in my experience it indeed does take time to load django and linked to this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1702562/speeding-up-the-f...
Automated Launch of 100 node Riak Cluster on EC2
This one is tricky. How do you know if the person is in need of a service at the moment of their search or for a later time.
Crushing apps is not a big problem (Zynga still earns more than facebook itself). The problem is we cannot sign an SLA, or have any other contractual relationship with facebook, even though they take a 30% cut or ouf virtual currency sales.
What a Bad Idea - Robot Sword Fighting 
Georgia Tech researcher Tobias Kunz presented his paper "Robot Sword Fighting" this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). His main theme is to make robots safe and flexible while they are doing some work for humans. To teach a robot how to fight using sword Kunz used novel algorithmic model for physical human-robot interaction with hybrid dynamics. Using this algorithm a robot can select optimal motions in response to human actions and maximize safety.
Good article. Hardcore.
If you don't trust Google with your data, why are you using Google Docs?
I was at the BBC working on a large Perl codebase which was a fairly typical Catalyst/DBIx::Class stack. It had thousands of tests which thanks to the foolish way we loaded reference data and pre-populated memcache etc. had the test suite running for 3 hours. As you can imagine, it was a nightmare for TDD and indeed for large merges (by the time you've run tests trunk would have inevitably changed). We never fixed it thanks to a combination of lazyness and a case of "it's legacy code, won't be around much longer" syndrome.

http://qwerly.com runs a tight and fast Node.js stack at the front-end with a test suite that takes less than a second to run (a few hundred assertions). I'll dedicate much time to the framework around it's tests and make sure it's never slow.
Android Test Builds of Firefox 5/6 Available
well, good for you then.
Duplicate of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2550278
Google has no way of knowing if money was exchanged for a link. Therefore, penalizing link buying/selling is very hard if not impossible. There are some instances where it is possible to tell based on footprints left of known networks that sell links. However, Google still has no idea if the link was purchased by the website the link points to or if it was purchased by a competitor trying to get the website penalized. The only thing that Google can do is devalue links that look like they were purchased.

You're probably thinking - "Well what about JC Penny. They got penalized for buying links after the NYT article came out with proof of link buying". Did they get penalized? Or did those links just get devalued which resulted in a drop in rankings? Or did Google take action on them just to set an example and scare webmasters? Personally, I think the links were just devalued or JCP was given a temporary "penalty" to appease those that were calling foul. JCP has regained a lot of rankings for keywords that have the same manipulative link building patterns as what they were originally "penalized" for - look at the search results for "personalized jewelry" and you'll see JCP at #1. Look at the backlinks using OpenSiteExplorer and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

So what can Google do to detect "link buying" or other forms of manipulative link building? Since they can't police transactions that's out of the question. Something they can do, however, is look at the anchor text distribution of incoming links. If a website has 1000 links pointing to their site using the anchor text "my competitive keyword" and only a few other links using different anchor text, then that's a good sign there's something fishy is going on. Maybe that could signal a manual review is needed to determine if the site in question is actually relevant to the search results for that query. After all, if the searchers are happy then Google should be happy. Searchers don't know if a website is "cheating". All they know is if what they searched for is relevant to their query.
Lazy Lists in Python and C++
heres a link to the slides: http://social-traffic.streamie.org/preso/static/#slide1
I would think something like Mongoid might be a contender (no idea how they actually compare).
It is true though. I remembering seeing an interview with a rather frank Congressman confirming this.
Tackling the Awkward Squad - Concurrency, I/O, etc in Haskell
You're right. I'm distracted by the reported 20-30 second environment load time for each test when it only takes about 7 seconds for my tests to start with autotest in my current pretty large app on an older MBP.
Overall a good article, although the claim that "WiFi has 11 channels and can give you 220Mbit in the air" is just wrong. You'll never deploy on all 11 channels without causing massive adjacent channel interference. 802.11 likes 25 MHz per AP, and the 2.4GHz channels are only 5 MHz apart. Deploying on anything other than 1, 6 or 11 will cause more problems than it will solve.

Additionally, dismissing the 5 GHz channels by claiming "those have lots of issues with many devices" is a facile argument. Deploying 5GHz channels (of which there are many more than 2.4GHz) is an excellent strategy in many cases - it enables you to offload 5GHz-capable clients (laptops, tables) from the 2.4GHz radios, freeing them up for 2.4GHz-only systems (smartphones, old laptops).

Anybody looking to deploy WiFi at a large conference needs to read Aruba Networks' High-Density Validated Design Guide, regardless of the hardware vendor you choose:

http://www.arubanetworks.com/pdf/technology/DG_HighDensity_V...

Appendix B and C contain some excellent information on planning and theory.
Yup, title is absurd, but the article is great.
Standard way to do this is with Fourier series on the sawtooth wave.

http://math.mit.edu/classes/18.03/spr10/lec_22.txt
Logjam's comments on the Flexner repor are widely accepted to be true. If you're not familiar with it, it's worth reading the wikipedia article on the subject. Pre-Flexner, it was a dangerous, anything-goes world.
If you read to the bottom of the email chain here: http://twitter.com/#!/ryah/status/69624489893314560, ry says he rewrote the parser.
strong preference for NYC, but will consider remote for exceptionally strong candidates.
That said, I don't want to sound like I'm ripping into this article too bad. Sashimi is really cool.
O(1) prepend doesn't conflict with good contiguity at all. Deque is an useful data structure with (possibly amortised) O(1) prepend and append, O(1) indexing and excellent contiguity.
Joshua is one of about a dozen angel investors in a round the company raised back in October, along with First Round Capital and Charles River Ventures. The real VCs took a board seat.
IMO BranchOut is even worse, their page now features a very clever and very evil "spam your friends" feature in disguise.

The worst thing is this kind of crap is very effective. Look at Zynga, they've built a billion dollar company out of it.
"You also don't seem to be taking into account that interest rates are very, very low at the moment, you definitely can't plan around those rates."

That's what 30-year fixed means: you can plan around those rates for the life of the mortgage.

"A lot of lenders also have heavy penalties for early payment. If you don't it probably means that the lender has given you an overall worse rate to compensate..."

I think that's fairly rare now. There are plenty of reasons that buying a house might be bad; but in this environment, bad loan terms are not one of them as long as you shop around.

"All you can lose renting is your deposit."

It's more complicated than that. Rising rents can be a risk, too, because you need to live somewhere. Also, there are costs (financial and otherwise) if you are forced to move by the landlord.
If the author is really concerned about rails3 performance has he opened a ticket with his specific case? tenderlove has been addressing AR performance issues in rails3 for quite some time.
Bill Gates: Why MIT matters
Bait-y title requires bait-y response:

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
You can hardly expect politicians to understand the
ramifications of the legislation they're proposing.

Sound of jaw hitting floor

If there is one thing I expect politicians to understand, it is exactly that: the laws they propose. Passing the laws that serve their country the best, that is the most important part of their job. Everything else can be delegated, but this is why they spend time together in a room, debating issues and voting on laws. They don't even need to read it: they need a trusted expert to tell them what decision they are taking for the future of their country.
Sick of seeing Quora on Ycombinator.........
I'm a bit confused on what Nintendo is doing differently..
So pumped for the Try It sections! This book is fantastic and Try It is a wonderful addition.
A companies servers is a companies problem, that's all there is to it. No one forced Sony to store sensitive customer information, but they chose to -- and they also chose to neglect the security ramifications around it.

Imagine your bank decided to store your money in an unprotected vault, no security, and then it goes missing one day. Yes, a criminal stole it, but it was only possible because the bank deceived the customers into thinking their money was secure. As far as I'm concerned, there's two criminals in this equation.
President Obama does not want to throw me, personally, in jail. That's link bait. A deceptive headline used to draw eyes.

Slinging mud at specific politicians is not productive, since most of them don't know enough to understand why this language is unacceptably vague. I'd hazard that most of Congress is in favor of this language. We need to educate them as to why this language is dangerous, not start a partisan battle. The problems with this legislation are way bigger than Obama.
Great article, it presents one example of how a small business could use issue shares to reward employees with meaningful ownership of the company. Current exchange systems (a) don't allow meaningful ownership (voting is too inconvenient to matter), (b) are only good for large public corporations (GLBSE is free), and (c) don't properly dilute over time to give new shareholders the chance to catch up.

Could you give a different example of how a small business would use GLBSE for capitalization by selling shares to investors - like a cross between angel investing and kickstarter?
FWIW, the main article has "GLBSE", not "GBLSE".
This. That kind of wording is right up there with "Now 50% more effective!"

"...than what?" is always my first question.
I've never ever gotten why people get so mad that the database gets hit on every request. It's going to get hit anyway on every request for something else. I've seen how easy it is to break into systems that don't re-auth the user on each request. I guess I just feel like people spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about database performance. A single select from a single table shouldn't be a performance bottleneck. It seems to me that a good database will have that query cached in memory. It may sound "icky" but if you look at the times, I bet your Rails app spends way more time in the renderer than it does for the "select users.* from user" that it uses to populat current_user.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I've written a lot of apps before I moved to Rails, and we used to avoid re-authing the user / looking it up on each request, and it's just never made a bit of difference to us.
>The one thing new legislation should do is...

This puzzles me. You correctly note how absolutely abysmal the political arena is for crafting well-defined rules regarding technical issues, and yet you immediately start agitating for more regulation. Do you really want to be compelled to conform to whatever (likely flawed) procedural policy the politicians and bureaucrats would come up with? A policy which would require further legislation to fix (much to the joy of lawyers and lobbyists)?

How about this instead: repeal some legislation. Repeal the laws that prosecute Good Samaritans who, after a reporting a security flaw to a firm, release it to the public who might be harmed by the flaw. If the firm has no procedures in place to deal with the reports, then too bad for them; they don't get to use the state as a club against others.

I'm fully aware that none of that will happen. The police power of the state confers no wisdom on those willing to wield it. Nor do they have any incentive to write good laws, but on the contrary are encouraged by interested parties to write bad laws (intentionally or not). So please, stop agitating for new laws in the vain hope that finally, this time, they won't create a plethora of unintended consequences and injured innocents.
I might have been a little harsh on the 5GHz. There is currently a pretty widespread active problem (might depend on AP hardware/software) with some Apple hardware that is pretty much impossible to debug on a large scale, so that the only option we found was to disable it.
Find somebody like patio11 who is passionate about web businesses not necessarily the product.
Barbers still use straight razors these days (at least mine does! If yours doesn't, find one that does, it's a treat!), and other implements that can cut you.

And food preparation is in fact a licensed occupation: http://www.google.com/search?q=food+handlers+license
Rewarding Social Entrepreneurs
Please be nice when pointing out mistakes. Not everyone is a native English speaker here.