skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, it is pretty funny for this poster to use this as a reason why perl is a well thought out language. It like all languages has pros and cons, and picking one thing about perl that isn't even unique to perl isn't a good example of how perl is so well thought out.

Second, I agree with the premise that having two separate structures is better, but a lot of the issues brought up in this post just don't come up in the real world. For example with PHP once you understand that the array() construct is just a hash map with a linked list that stores the ordering, a lot of the these complications are much less complicated. Just don't think of the keys as indexes in an array, think of them as keys in a hash map that have nothing to do with ordering. If you want to change the order, you need to change the linked list, which initially is set by insert order but can be changed to something else by using various sort functions. Again, I'm not saying this is the greatest design in the world, but I am saying that living with this design in practical application isn't a big deal.

In fact, the biggest annoyance has nothing to do with any coding stuff, it is just that you pay a huge memory penalty if you just want a simple array of items. Luckily PHP added a few newer data structures (http://www.php.net/manual/en/spl.datastructures.php) like SplFixedArray which are much more memory efficient. Obviously in standard usage the memory doesn't really matter, but in some cases where you want very large data structures these new objects come in handy.
Which tech startup will win funding from Citrix? And Why?
yes. API is definitely a part of it and yes, I was thinking about yahoo pipes as well. :-)
This is incredibly pedantic, and yet, fails to point out parts of the problem. Or maybe the guy just wanted to flatter himself in saying that people that does not want to learn how to use a text editor (can't refrain the old joke : or the editor it lacks) are necessarily stupid morons that can't have a proper opinion on the subject.

I tend to orient my tool choice to one that will require the least effort and still allow to achieve the task properly, even though the least effort might be, sometimes, a huge effort.
I concentrate on the least effort for a simple reason : if a better tool I could not imagine comes out, I will minimize the hard learned knowledge I'll have to discard. Putting effort in something gives you momentum, you won't let it go easily, because you make the balance difficult to evaluate. Jump between easy to switch solutions, and you are guaranteed to mostly enjoy the best tools (for its class at least) you can get.
Funny you should mention Citibank and security in the same breath, just the week after this:

http://consumerist.com/2011/06/how-hackers-stole-200000-citi...
Chrome is gaining features, yes. However, since with each release the Chrome team manages to eke additional performance out of it, I think it's a little premature to decry it as "bloat".
I don't know if it is what you want, but for quick & dirty shares I use: http://join.me
I think that if there's an overriding principle behind it, you could say the principle is this:

The world is full of crazy laws and arbitrary rules which are frequently both boring and harmful. The only reasonable laws are ones that are purposeful and enforceable. If a law is stupid or if you can't enforce the law, we will break it at our whimsy, and if you don't like it, then you're the one that should change somehow, because anyone else could and probably should go break it too.

You could say that this is the grow-a-thicker-skin Internet philosophy. It's an idea that is appealing if you're young, moderately intelligent and computer-savvy, because your life has probably been filled with really stupid rules that are totally pointless and/or completely unenforceable, and you have no idea how to fix it, and you have probably never been on the other end of things.
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To the Mozilla developers in here:

Although I am not going to install this version on my laptop (I am a chrome guy), I would like to take the opportunity and thank you for the great work you have done for the internet users and web developers.

In the days before firefox+firebug, we were alerting all the way in order to find an undefined / unassigned variable which was causing bugs and terror.

You have made the web a better place, you have made IE a better browser, and I tend to believe, you also made chrome a better browser, and chrome developers work harder by setting the bar that high.
Mt. Gox are now accepting claims to recover accounts.
> "In my opinion, they exist because the electorate is misguided in believing that this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea."

Or, a bit more cynically, they're paid to believe this kind of 'censorship' is a good idea.
haven't used it much. I wanted a pattern engine so the intelligence finally rests with the user without the user needing to know regex or even programming.
Ask HN: First world country with simple tax system?
Is your country's tax system easy to understand ? In particular, for people who work on their own or as entrepreneurs.
Just out of curiosity. I'm german, and we produce more than half the tax related literature in the world.
For more color on why this outfit may be having trouble, witness: http://blog.zuupy.com/

"Disadvantages of A/B Testing", "Moving Away From Facebook", "Ideas are not Worthless", "Blippy Failed Because it Was Too Sexy", etc.
It mishandles it because some signals that set certain characters up as the good guys that we should route for are in conflict with actions they take which destroy some of our sympathy for them, indicating that the writers didn't really think through the moral implications of those actions, brushing them off too lightly.

For instance, when the butcher boy is killed, Stark looks mildly perturbed but doesn't protest about it, and is still willing to throw his lot in with the despicable Lannisters. It's mostly shrugged off, but the incident was far too dark for that. Or another example, Robb Stark sacrificing two thousand soldiers on a suicide mission which was a strategic feint. Although one can see how the tactic might work, it just makes no sense on a human scale, unless you buy into that glorious death-in-battle nonsense big time (on a Kling-on scale it would be ok).
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The "search bar keeping your previous search term" issue has to do with the ownership of the search box. It used to be, when tabs were below the search box, that made sense. You'd be using the same one search box no matter which tab you were on, and thus it would always keep the same search term between tabs.

Now, with tabs-on-top, each tab contains its own search box. These should be unique, just like each tab has its own URL bar. It doesn't make sense at all that search queries are preserved between tabs. But that's the way Firefox still does it.

(Thinking about this now, I guess that's a different issue than the one you were talking about... why any search box saves any query after pressing "Enter". Still an annoying little quirk though.)
Who invented the personal computer?
Turntable.fm Really is Awesome. Is it Legal?
Anyone who had any confidential data in Dropbox (medical research data, credit card transaction data) must now file a data breach report.
Cool ! Too bad I'm not in Paris !
You guys are real geeks, doing a tech meetup on the French Music Day !

I'd love to see such a meetup in Lyon.
Getting rid of Internet Explorer once and for all
I'm biased of course, but I like the /monte game, its a good way of seeing the value proposition.

As for why that might be HN worthy, the problem a search engine has is to somehow show that its value proposition works. On blekko if you append /monte to your query you will see the same query done on Blekko, Google, and Bing. You don't know which is which but you get to pick the results you like best.
More thoughts on what may be on tap for Microsoft's WinC++
I like the search box because the URL history autocomplete of the main URL bar is so much better in Firefox than any browser. I can type any part of a page title or URL (not just the start) and it goes through and finds pages from my history. I do that much more often than I search for things and so I really like having them separate.
NY Times cuts character limit on comments from 5,000 to 2,000
hilarious, but you all know that journalists in the tech world are seen as the "I-dont-know-nothing-but-I'll-just-pretend__with-a-smile-like-if-i-understood."
Haha - bogus voodoo stuff, reminds me of Papa Shango (any old school WWF fans in here?) http://www.google.com/search?q=papa+shango
Best new feature: Multiple tab closing behavior is more like Chrome's now - http://www.theinvisibl.com/2009/12/08/chrometabs/
I agree. But time is on their side. The mobile OSes and browsers on them will only get faster over time.
My 125 days at a startup
Facebook takes down Roger Ebert's page over anti-drunk driving comment
So, BDUF?
How is this different from Python's lists/dictionaries?

Also IIRC PHP does internally differenciate between array(1,2,3) and array('blah'=>1, 'bloop' =>); Just the syntax is not as clear.
We attended a small scientific research conference that allowed booths. At these conferences researchers often set up posters that can take up quite a bit of room. The organizers didn't account for this correctly and we ended up being pushed off the main floor down a hallway. This hallway happened to be where most people entered and thought we were the registration desk, which worked out really well as a softer introduction...

'We are actually a sponsor of the conference that sells research products and chemicals. The registration desk is right ahead...'

People appreciated the help and returned to talk or took a moment right then to learn more...

Lesson learned - location matters and may not be where you think.
The search box provides suggestions, but it does this by sending everything you type to your search provider. The address box doesn't, because we feel it's bad for privacy to send every web address you type to a third party.
A Simple Scripting Language - Part 5 - Designing a VM
Oh and please use it if you want to... I will make sure I reserve a free place for you in case I go the paid route later on :-)

my email is in my profile so you can send me yours.
Would love to try it - agree with the others, the visual interface is very very nicely done (I've been reading up on this subject recently...!)

The video makes me want to try it out. If I dare offer one suggestion...the guitar music is a bit bland and seems out of place with the video, maybe I'm missing something. Great job overall!
There was actually a guest post on TC regarding this topic recently, which broke it down according to the data: http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/12/math-of-techcrunch-startups...

The conclusion in the author's words: "TechCrunch is covering more early-stage startups than ever before, but sadly that coverage is often drowned out by an even greater volume of posts on larger companies."
This brings to mind A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, by John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the EFF:

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

It was written in 1996 but feels more relevant as every year goes by.
I run a project which uses cell phones to monitor the police - http://www.openwatch.net/ - so this patent is _terrifying_ to me.

Police already use cell phone jammers in prisons and remote systems to disable engines of vehicles in chases, I don't doubt for a second that they would use this as a way to disable recording devices at public demonstrations, etcetera. The (anti)feature may be put in place to prevent 'piracy' of live events, but a backdoor is a backdoor.
Awesome, thanks for the link. Didn't realize there was an extension to let you run extensions. :)
DOM Snitch: Google's passive in-the-browser reconnaissance tool
Earth to techwriter... Google already has a full realtime exchange stack. They're buying publisher relationships.
That's not the whole point of an array, an array also has practical uses!
Perl has 3 ways to iterate over a hash: "keys", "values", and "each". The first two do what you'd think; "each" in array context iterates over key/value pairs. All three return their results in an "apparently random" order.

You can also use "for" to iterate over a hash, same as you would over an array, but in that case the hash is converted to a list of alternating keys and values, which isn't as useful.

[edited to correct a typo]
Cool. Glad they thought about that situation before switching to this new release/versioning system.
So Lua is able to pull it off, but there's something that consistently confuses people? Forgive me, but hose sound contradictory.
I started writng some docs since the api and such has settled down. I have plans for a screencast too.
I like this feature because no one has any editorial control on what I can search for while using /monte. Obviously, there are instances where blekko is worse, but by in large it's pretty obvious which is blekko and which is google/bing.
A JSON (or SOAP) backend is only usable by third parties if its API is kept stable. There are far too many devs who redesign their backend request and response formats at the drop of a hat because they think their js client is the only one that matters (a self-fulfilling prophesy) and they can replace it simultaneously. And their responses tend to look like "here's some more markup to stuff into an arbitrary location in the DOM we're using today", not semantically structured (e.g., Rails now has this built into JavaScriptGenerator). A given site can be reverse-engineered, but anything built on that is going to be fragile and short-lived, much more so than when the typical visual rendering desired for a page determined its structure.
No, it's still really light and fast. Prefer it to Firefox to this day.

It's gaining features and it's able to do more things than other browsers, but that doesn't make it bloated.
Ahh, moo.com, my favorite site to check whether I have internet (so much faster to type than google.com). Thank you for having a pretty site.
Cost of bandwidth?
If I were to start a media streaming site (video), what could I estimate in terms of rough numbers the cost of bandwidth to be? Just trying to get an idea of revenues vs expenses for an idea.

Thanks
Steve Jobs talks to developers about saying "No"
Also, http://www.google.com/search?q=%22review+my+startup%22
Security implications of jit compilation -- wingolog
i like your comment, since I have been through the same blues. it's hard to excite people when they feel they haven't been part of the core idea from day one. would you say, that, in your case, finding trustworthy partners is a more crucial task in the first year than finding people who are really good at what they do? or is that an impossible statement in the frist place? trying to wrap my head around these problems to refine my concept a bit. all comments like joshua's are greatly appreciated.
Not only does Lua have the length problem, but array offsets are a matter of convention. Lua chooses 1 as the first element of an array instead of 0. But that is just convention. Your code could use 0 or -100. A confusing implementation of length and offsets by convention instead of using nearly universal array semantics from other languages is not "well-designed". It's a cheap hack to conflate everything into one table data structure.
How Not to Deliver Bad News: Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi | Effectual Analysis
Actually, one reason web developers can benefit from running pre-release browsers is that you are in the best position to prevent breaking changes from happening. If a bug that breaks your web site makes it out to the 400 million people on our stable channel, then it's too late stop your users from seeing it. But if you report the bug to the vendor when it first appears in alpha or beta, you improve the chance it will be fixed before your mainstream users ever see it.
And anyone who stored that sort of data in dropbox more or less had it coming. HIPAA & finance laws are very clear about the security they require -- dropbox has always been hand-wavey in their explanation of their security.
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I've been using Blekko as my main search engine for 6 weeks, and I'm really happy.

Greg Lindahl, the CTO spoke on SEO for Hackers & Founders Co-op, and he was amazing. I love what Blekko's doing, and I have no doubt they're going to do quite well.
Maybe it was just my eyes, but the black color scheme is murder to read, especially when it came to the links at the bottom.
If you want to view BTC as a commodity, it does look very boiler-room-y.

If you want to view BTC as a currency, it doesn't look that way... IMO.
You're right, I would absolutely be surprised.

Persistent data structures intrinsically involve copying on updates, and no amount of compiler cleverness can avoid that. I can see the possibility for compiler magic with stream fusion, for example, but I'm not seeing it for data structures. The only win I can see is if you have multiple clients of your data structure holding references to multiple versions, but even there the compiler doesn't help you. Am I missing something?
It is actually one month after the French Music Day, which is today.
Ubi maior minor cessat is not law here, but it's a safe default. Amazon's Bezos may not be the rightful owner, but it's certainly one of them.
Well, this got a bunch of upvotes and a bunch of downvotes. Quite honestly, I'm not complaining about the scoring, but I'd like to understand the thinking here. Is it just "I want the shiny new API, stop saying these unpleasant things?"

I am not a web developer; I just live in their world. And it's clear that we'll get WebGL and a bunch of other things like it anyhow, since there is tremendous pressure to make web apps more like local apps.

Here are some well-known things about graphics drivers - I do have some knowledge in this domain, but honestly, these are things that anyone can find out himself:

-- They've become quite complex. With the rise of GPGPU, the graphics driver now includes a C compiler, a virtual machine (or several specialized virtual machines), debug hooks, and tons of other code.

-- The driver development teams are not focused on security. Their API is meant to be used by a local application, and if you're running an executable, especially one that can talk to the driver for your screen, the executable can already do whatever it wants.

-- There has not been any sort of a scramble among video driver teams to prepare for WebGL. It's not in the job description of their product to provide a sandbox for malicious code. The graphics driver is not a JVM. And I am very unconvinced by the proposed measures for WebGL security in the browser, which include such things as blacklisting a driver once a vuln is reported. What about before it's reported?

-- If you're using virtualization for security, I seriously recommend not using the "accelerated 3D" option. I don't know of published exploits, and the virtualization does make it somewhat difficult for a malware writer, but you are NOT getting any sort of a hardware-enforced guarantee the moment you enable the passing of commands to GPU. Now, VMWare (and others) are very aware of security issues, and are working on GPU virtualization with that in mind. But it's still not the same guarantee.

My bottom line is that I would seriously prefer for WebGL not to become popular, until a serious standard for sandboxed virtual GPUs is worked out. But it seems some people just can't wait.
And that sequential tables are 1-indexed, not 0-indexed like nearly every other language on the planet.
send me a note - michaelrlitt at gmail dot com
Heh, glad you liked the Beta Stamp; it was one of those 2am additions to the design. I will spend some time on the registration section to make some tweaks - we can certainly make it more friendly. Thanks for the feedback.
Yeah, I guess he wasn't concerned about putting any effort into making it easy for others to read his thoughts.

sigh

Written text is supposed to be written to be parsed by humans. Why do people forget that?
This is not an either or scenario. Both test different things and should be written. I don't want to criticize DB since god knows everyone makes stupid mistakes, but this finally convinced me that I will never pay them for their service and that I should encrypt ALL data in that folder (instead of just the sensitive data, which is what I do now).
Curious, what does this refer to: "But I guess Airbnb already disproved that."
As has been mentioned, Google's not going to put in features if it slows down Chrome--they care about speed too.

The other problem with adding features, interface bloat, doesn't apply as much either, since most of these features are available for webapps to use, and replace the requirement for Flash, which is the main thing making browsers slow.
As long as the personalizations are just a transformation and not a subtraction

This is the crucial point. As long as it's accessible, I can get what I want by search refinement either way (but I would imagine that it would be easier for me to refine in the space in which I am familiar than to refine in the unfamiliar space). Giving me the (easy) option to turn it off is a good idea for search.
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He ran the irc server for LulzSec. Not exactly loosely affiliated, but still not their mastermind.
We definitely need to add some screenshots; likely, I will split the video off to the left and have some screenshots to the right. Thanks for taking a moment to comment.
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>What's your justification for calling their concerns "thorough nonsense"?

1) Currencies are not securities, and this is plain in definitions of the Securities Act of 1933 and following;

2) The Stamp Payments Act was enacted at the end of the wildcat banking period to end the circulation of small-denomination (less than one dollar) money by bank issuers. It clearly relates to dollar-denominated coins and notes. Bitcoin is a separate currency and has no physical form and no fixed denominations; regardless, the law applies no more to the use of Bitcoin than to the use of any other currency in the United States, which is not controversial.

3) I already explained the tax situation;

4) How is 'consumer protection' a legal issue related to the currency of denomination of a charitable donation?

5) Bitcoin could certainly abet money laundering, but the anti-money-laundering laws of the United States, in addition to regulating the conduct of financial institutions, apply almost exclusively to those who knowingly engage or intend to engage in transactions involving the proceeds of illegal activity.

Bitcoin raises a couple of interesting questions related to its fundamental electronic form, but the objections given are just nonsense.
The problem with Erlang, is it doesn’t let you do that. Erlang is religious about concurrency. Erlang allows any concurrency model as long as it’s actors. Unlike Java/C++/Scala it doesn’t provide concurrency constructs that allow you to create other concurrency models. It works at a higher level of abstraction.

That's not even close to true. Getting different building blocks from a language/runtime is not the same as not getting any building blocks.

Erlang absolutely thrashes the JVM with it's concurrency features, and easily extends across cores and machines like not much else.
Care to explain, because I can't see it.
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