skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not if you decide you don't want to use Dropbox anymore. Your data is tied to their service (and terms of use and privacy policy and pricing).
This is a vote for consistency. Reasonable array syntax would be out of place in PHP.
Well, ignoring that you've pointed to an example of a licensed cab driver, as that's "not the point being made here", there really isn't a point to be made.

What you've pointed to is a risk of allowing people to interact, and really has very little (if any) to do with cab regulation. Being murdered is a risk anytime you're around other people; its just so remote that usually it is appropriately ignored.

Further, if there were an epidemic of cab-murders, which of course a single anecdote doesn't show, such that it made sense to worry about the risk of homicide, then the people calling cabs would be aware of this, and there would be market demand for a cab company that does full background checks, offers life-insurance policies, sends a second person to guard against malfeasance, etc. Of course, murder is illegal, so police would be looking for the perpetrators as well.

Even if for some reason a that didn't happen (say, people enjoy being murdered during their cab ride) and we wanted to prevent it anyway, the type of regulations that'd make sense would be things like background checks before issuing a license (which would need renewing routinely), which would apply to all cab operators, both new and renewing.

Keep in mind that the regulations that people actually object to are mostly of the form "we allow X cabs total in the city".
I'm not sure where his GPS location would have come from. Do MacBooks have GPS built in these days?

Also, from the photo's it is only clear that he has the guys email address, and even if he did have his password I'm not sure what he could do with it without committing a fairly serious offense.

I really have no idea how you would go about contacting this person without putting yourself in a compromised position. I realize that you do not want people to jump to conclusions as to this guys guilt, however, at the very least he would be a leading suspect in the theft of this laptop, and that is not the sort of person I'd meet for a coffee and to talk about him maybe giving back my laptop.

Also, if you emailed the guy and politely asked him to return the laptop how long do you think it would take for him to get rid of it on craigslist or ebay?

Therefore, attempting to get more information on who this person is in order to build evidence that the police might be interested in looking at seems quite reasonable.
Why try to make PHP more readable? Just use another language.

PHP, like C++, is a big industry dinosaur that can't and won't change.

In my opinion, the best think you could do is create a new language which compiles to PHP. I.e. A coffeescript for PHP. You don't have to "vote" and get stupid arguments against; you don't have to be backward compatible; and you only have great programmers in that project since crappy ones will just continue to use their 1500 lines unmaintainable functions anyway.
"I love this."

Really? Personally, I hate spam.
Here are the claims I can think of in the last few days:

- Claiming that your email newsletter's Gmail reputation affects your ranking: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2600933 I did a full debunk here: http://goo.gl/6A8f9

- Claiming that Hacker News was penalized by Panda: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595704 I did a full debunk here: http://goo.gl/7Tw9o

- There was an SEO blog that had a headline "Google Copying Bing's Image Results? Google Cheating Bing?" at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-indexing-bing-13477.html when in fact it was just images on bing.net and Bing neglected to have a robots.txt file. We have a policy against search results in search results, so we were happy to remove the images in less than a day. The SEO blogger changed the headline to be less sensational.

- Oh, one more debunk: http://allthingsd.com/20110527/google-no-government-investig... The webspam team continues to take manual action to remove spam in the same way that we have for the last decade.

Those are the four debunks that come to mind from the last week or so. Sigh.
I just signed up for an account with sipgate.com and added it to my Google Voice account. It's pretty trivial and is orthogonal to text messaging and voicemail. You just have to be on Gingerbread.
Posting pictures on the internet is far different from lynching someone.

The court system and government should treat people as innocent until proven guilty. Private citizens have a lower responsibility.

At no point did the original poster claim that man stole his laptop - he merely stated that his laptop was stolen and posted pictures of the man currently possessing the stolen laptop. Other people assumed this man stole the laptop, which may or may not be accurate.

The man is in possession of stolen property. At some point we need to balance the owner's rights to retrieve stolen property against the right's of a man possessing stolen property to retain complete anonymity.
Well, you don't need to use your primary email username/password. It only uses this to deliver mail. Just create a new one for the purposes of Prey.
I know it isn't exactly what you are suggesting, but I intend to double major in Math and CS and possibly get a minor in Italian.
Seems to me ripe for abuse and also ripe for stories of collateral damage.
YouTube  Google I/O: The iframe Player API
I'm not sure exactly what you are implying about feeling since Apple is very polarizing (happy iOS devs are getting sued?), but if you take a step back you'll see that this isn't just an Apple problem. The lawsuits will come to Android app devs next, and probably most other mobile platforms with in-app purchases.
That is unlikely to matter - mysql and postsql doesn't allow connections from outside of localhost by default on Ubuntu (and properly other unixes as well).

So really, yeah if you already have local access you can pwn the box, but you have pretty much done that already.
This does not seem reasonable. I mean that literally -- this feels more like a choice driven by culture than by reason.

The cons seem nowhere near strong enough to counter the fact that the overwhelming majority of users want this syntax, and have been asking for it for years.
I work from home full time, and my salary is about 20% lower than the market rate for developers with my experience. It's worth it to me. You have to be the kind of person who can separate work and home life, though.

If I were offered a 50% pay increase that required I commute an hour each way and spend all day in an office, I wouldn't take it.
>>It implies that a person of normal natural abilities has a shot at becoming world-class

The key lies in the definition of normal. Does it mean no less than 1 standard deviation below average? Does it mean above average? Above 1 standard deviation and less than 2? See, people in all those ranges are normal, and just by reducing a little the scope of "normal" a lot of people are filtered out.

My conjecture is that at least above average innate abilities are required, which by definition leaves out half the population.
There are many education programs in place that also need some funding, targeted at less affluent kids. In NYC alone there is MicroInterns (matching middle schoolers to tech startups) by George Haines:

http://www.teacherhaines.com/microinterns

They could use a SquareSpace site...

Also, NY Tech Meetup is doing a Startup Summer program where we get high school students into internships at tech startups: http://nytm.org/2011/05/04/nytm-to-host-2nd-annual-startup-s...

Programs like these that are supplemental to the general education kids will be getting in middle, high-school, and college are necessary, but they would never be able to replicate everything that a young person needs to learn in order to survive.

There are many ways to make education better, lets try to have systems that support each other.

Jason, want to donate to the MicroIntern program? :-)
You really think you'll get effective monetization out of a Bitcoin miner that's written in JavaScript and only run on people's short one-minute visits to a website?

Bitcoin mining is orders of magnitude more efficient on a GPU than on a CPU, and that's compared to the fastest C++ clients, not something running in a JavaScript interpreter. Maybe a popular installable game that's played for hours at a time and uses people's excess GPU to mine Bitcoin could be profitable. But this is just a waste of everyone's time.
Linus Torvalds Approves Linux 3.0 RC1
Please, list object-oriented systems with objects with identities and object-oriented systems without those. Count both. Discuss. ;)

Alan Kay, who coined term "object-oriented" described object-oriented system as an assembly of objects communicating by message passing. Message passing requires identities (and state, except in severely reduced form).
You scare me. :-)

I moved to Cluj (Transylvania) this spring.

I am thinking about looking for another job, but would like to stay here. I am scared that telecommuting will make me unhappy.

Good food, wonderful nature, good weather (ok, most anywhere has better weather than Scandinavia), nice people, a hot girlfriend, etc.
> The first two uses of () are anonymous functions

No they're not. They are just containers for arguments to a function. In Scala whenever you call a function which takes as it's only parameter another function, you can even replace them entirely with curly brackets:

scala> (1 to 5).map(_ * 5)
res1: scala.collection.immutable.IndexedSeq[Int] = Vector(5, 10, 15, 20, 25)

is equivalent to:

scala> 1 to 5 map { _ * 5 }
res3: scala.collection.immutable.IndexedSeq[Int] = Vector(5, 10, 15, 20, 25)

The _ symbol is equivalent to the % in your Clojure example. So both examples above are equivalent to:

scala> (1 to 5).map((x:Int) => x * 5)
res2: scala.collection.immutable.IndexedSeq[Int] = Vector(5, 10, 15, 20, 25)

You don't need _any_ characters or visual indicators to declare an anonymous function. Example:

scala> def apply(op: Int => Int, y: Int) = op(y)
apply: (op: (Int) => Int, y: Int)Int

Can then be called as:

scala> apply(_ * 10, 10)
res4: Int = 100

Or:

scala> apply((x:Int) => x * 10, 10)
res5: Int = 100

Or even:

scala> apply((_ * 10), 10)
res6: Int = 100

Perhaps your original point stands that in Clojure you have _better_ visual clues for picking out anonymous functions at a glance, but I disagree that you even need them in the Scala code you posted.
The Benefits of Going Organic
just out of curiosity, why the downvotes?
What this kind of analysis needs is a blind test. Ask three groups to rate text independently in the same metrics - 1) General public. 2) Psychologists 3) Algorithm.

The results should be interesting. However, if the authors claim subliminal effects, then I do not how that could be tested.
I've made an option to add controls, which shows the current hashrate and a start/stop button. Right now it's up to the websites using it to enable that if they want to.

I like the captcha idea, I've actually been planning something like that. I've got some changes I need to make to my infrastructure before I can do that, but I'm hoping to do it (or let other people do it with the API I'm going to offer).

Thanks for the advice about making the user feel appreciated, I think that's quite important.
John Lott is kind of a flake with several credibility problems: allegations of academic fraud in his studies and of not actually conducting a survey he claimed to have done, proven allegations of sockpuppeting ("Mary Rosh"), lack of corroboration of his claims by any other academics...

More Guns Less Crime is a snappy title, but mostly seems like a work of ideological pro-firearm propaganda in light of its author's many documented ethical issues.
Houston is well below a number of cities that have strict gun laws. D.C. being the most glaring example; among the strictest gun laws in the country, and the highest crime rates.

Houston also has a significant low-income population, and experienced white flight to the suburbs on a massive scale through the 70s and 80s; leaving behind a wrecked shell of a city (downtown has only recently started to come back to life; when I lived in Houston, downtown real estate was dirt cheap, but everyone was afraid to go there after dark).

In short, I don't think it's anywhere near as simple as "guns lead to more/less crime".
Isn't possession of stolen property prima facie proof of guilt of ... possession of stolen property?
One more characteristic: fearlessness. You have to be able to not only start, but commit to completing, a project even tho' you've no idea how to do it. You have to have that faith that you are smart enough to learn on the hoof, and you have to have the courage when you realize that you've written a ton of code already, when you realize you're heading down a dead end, to just delete it all.
The only issue I have with the missing http is that when you copy the link, it automatically adds in the http. Most of the time when copying a link I either don't care if the http is there, or I specifically don't want it (for example if I am sshing into a box.)

If they stuck with "copy what you see", at least for me, it would resolve one of my biggest peeves with Chrome. The other being useless tab text if you have too many tabs open (and I don't really like the side tabs.)
Microsoft to Unveil Touchscreen Windows Tablets This Week
Let's say your time is worth $75/hour. Not having to commute is worth 1.5 hours per day. Call it $110/day. Lunch/snack savings per day = $10/day. Gas/car wear savings = $10/day.

$140/day * 200 days per year = $28k.

The way it can be seriously beneficial is you can live/move to somewhere really cheap and still get paid big-city rates.

I knew a guy living on his own small ranch in the middle of nowhere making $150k/year. Living far better than the guy making $300k/year in Manhattan.
Sever a Mac’s Ethernet Access for Nighttime Security
Why would it be any more abused then the Facebook Like button?
Apple to $400 by July
Samsung Wants Early Look at Next iPhone, iPad
Oh come on. We've had this discussion about RSS before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060298 was the last big one), and plenty of people are using it in some capacity.
Apple Brings Keynote, Pages, Numbers to iPhone as Hybrid Apps
Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer, Advisory Panel Says
Oh, man, chess clock. Brilliant. I just dug out mine and put a new battery in it last month when when the gf challenged me (and she isn't going to do that again -- she hates to lose!)

In my experience, things like productivity and diet are easy to change in the short term, but long-term change depends on monitoring and sustained effort. The chess clock is a dead-simple monitoring device, and I'm already habituated to it thanks to many hours spent on chess in high school and college.
My Best Interview: About Global Brain, Consciousness and AI
Do you realize that BitCoins is elaborate pyramid scheme that targets computer geeks?
We're talking about PHP so obviously we are talking about web programming.

And if you specify one encoding and get a different one then exactly how do you plan to handle that? Obviously you need to know what encoding you get.

Recognizing whitespace works just fine in PHP - you can use ordinary string function and they will work with UTF-8 for that.

Sorting is more complicated, but I typically sort in the database which handles UTF-8 sorting correctly for me.

You should learn more about UTF-8. There is no reason to use any other character set.
Please post a writeup of your experience if/when this is resolved, and submit it to HN.
Whenever I stop coding PHP for a while and return to it, the lack of short array syntax always blows up in my face. I waste a lot of time debugging to just find that arrays need to be initialised with array().
> 5. More community centered posts aka AMA etc.

I consider AMA the best kind of self post... I don't see community centered posts as necessarily a bad thing except if there is too much of drama or he-did, she-did type content.
Being able to control your impulses and operate with some level of civilized executive function makes your identity worth stealing, because you're likely to have good credit. Petty thieves and other criminal morons are unlikely to have an identity worth stealing.
Apple is doing the right thing. It's Lodsys that needs to be crushed, preferably legally.
Sometimes software gets data with no encoding specified, or with wrong encoding. May be result of a bug, transmission glitch or attempt at hacking the software. As jrockway wrote, you can't trust data from user.

The software must handle every input in a predictable way. For wrong encoding, it may stop and signal error, or may continue processing the data -- depends on owner's wishes. But must not do anything stupid, no undefined behavior. Where doing something stupid could be giving user information he may not access (like SQL injections; IIRC wrongly-encoded data was successfully used for SQL injections by fooling code that should escape it), damaging data stored in system or saving invalid data if that would break consistency or any work later on.

Two things to be done:

1) instruct browser and other systems that work with your software to send and read UTF-8

2) handle situations when something else is sent instead

With UTF-8, the 2) is mostly done by PHP's mb_...() functions, IF configured correctly.
Free labor in exchange for education, contacts and a resume builder.

The idea sounds noble, in that, if such mentorship program is used in the right spirit, it could have a very positive impact on the youth's education and professional development. This sounds good on paper but I see potentially big downside with abuses. As a slightly related example, you could just look at the plight of illegal or early immigrants who end up working at below-market below-minimum wage jobs. If there are no laws to prevent such abuse of interns, people (read "market") would figure out a way to do just that. Such programs would help only in hands of right mentors.

I also tend to disagree on the notion of 35K a year wasted on college. College is much more education than education about a profession. It teaches kids social interaction, and gives them lifetime friends.

Edit: Corrected grammar.
I'd argue that it's an issue regarding conventional password length (probably stemming from the nomenclature―rather than password, it should be passphrase). I seem to remember an article floating a month ago on strong passwords, and how long, passwords (passphrases) like "fluffy is puffy" are stronger than "s#g789@d/".

Better user education (for want of a better word) is necessary as well―something as simple as adding the domain of the site in question to the password increases a user online identity by a significant amount.

With Moore's law (and quantum computers on the distant horizon), passwords will get ever-easier to crack―the next logical step are keys and certificates.
This one isn't javascript, it's based on my browser bitcoin miner[1] which is written in Java. It's about 2000 times faster than the javascript bitcoin miner that I know of.

It's around 30-40% slower than one of the optimized C CPU miners, and of course it's a a lot slower than a GPU miner, but it mines at a reasonable rate (and it starts up quickly)

As for effective monetization, this is something you can run in addition to regular ads if you wanted, since it doesn't take up any screen space.

[1] - http://www.bitcoinplus.com/generate
VeroBoardUino - How to Build an Arduino-Compatible Board for Very Little Money
Making the browser window smaller after closing the downloads bar is actually a bug, it doesn't do this on other platforms. I think this is fixed in the newest dev builds.
There are a few weird gaps in that story, though. The guy was wading fully clad in chest-high water for nearly an hour, which (a) suggests he was probably mentally ill and didn't necessarily want to be rescued, and (b) suggests he didn't seem to be in any immediate danger. As for how he progressed from wading in chest-high water to drowning, I'm not really sure -- that part is missing too.

So I'm not sure if they behaved quite right, but the article makes it sound less bad than the summary. Rescuing someone who is not thinking clearly and doesn't want to be rescued can go bad in all sorts of ways.
Spam is black hat.
There is hope in some cities. Or more likely there is hope with cops that actually care and believe in what they do. These cops are scattered in various cities but hard to find because they are probably helping someone else out and there are not enough of them.
It's the same reason why doctors aren't supposed to stop to help people at the side of the road - they aren't protected by good samaritan laws. If something goes wrong, they could be liable for it, even if the person would have died without intervention.

That being said, I think most doctors would do it anyway.
Ask HN: Where do I find WWDC session schedules?
http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/about/

Specifically,
- Is the keynote generally on Monday or Tuesday?
- When can we start lining up for it?
- When does the session end on Friday?

I can't find any information on this. Maybe someone who has been to WWDC in the past can answer these questions for me?

Thanks for your help!
All light does penetrate to some degree. Some photons of light will penetrate steel if your source is bright enough. But it's a question of how much.
Haha, thanks. Looking forward to an explanation of this.
Visually appealing is relative, if you like the way TextMate et al looks and value that sort of thing, Emacs isn't for you anyway.
But why not make it more readable? The patch exists - all it would take is for it to be accepted.

And there are a ton of people who can't justify the switching costs of moving to a different language. And true, a lot of us aren't great programmers. So?

Better tools help. And it's perfectly okay to build and improve tools that regular people will use. Even if they won't be creating the Mona Webapp. ;)
I'm just curious, where do you live? I live and attend university in Norway, and I must say, I don't think I know anyone that uses condoms on regular basis. Every girl I know uses an IUD or is on the pill, and most people I know get checked regularly. I know Norway is the "world leader" in one night stands [1], and has one of the most well educated populations in the world. Still, condom use is abysmally low. I wonder why this is? Every time I go to the states, I'm reminded how different the "average american youth" views the condom.

[1] http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article633160.ece
"explicitly stated" = "did not change the default"
Twitter Getting Photos In Order Ahead Of iOS 5 Integration
Video: Implementing Mix-ins in Python
Those myriad different meanings of "_" depending on context is positively Perl-like.

Seems like a good Scala style guide would ban the use of it altogether, or just white list a couple of uses.

Are both {} and () equally valid delimiters for scoping an anonymous function? If so, always using {} would help to avoid confusion with tuples.

{ _ + _ } as a function taking two arguments seems just wrong to me. Shouldn't it be { _1 + _2 }?
You've got to keep your eye out on how to access the full power of the client's GPU. I just saw how IE9 and FF4 offer GPU acceleration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7VLB4DcXhg

Also, when the user is scrolling the page can you throttle down, so basically the idea is not detract from the user experience. On-demand throttling down somehow. Maybe when a tab is not visible.
A few months back we built a 4-Tesla box for doing GPU cracking (I think for less than 15 grand total). Initially for doing WPA, but now for more general purpose cracking.

It's ludicrous how much quicker we get results. I'm hoping to start compiling some statistics, as it's been in near-constant use since January.