skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to challenge some of your points:

2. Just use 2 languages, like C + Lua. or C + anything-higher-level-than-Java. As a "language", such a combination is easily simpler than C++, and the high level part is way cleaner. My point is, don't use one complex tool when 2 simpler one can do.

On a side note, you should think about what OOP, templates, and "meta-programming" are good for. Most of the time, naked lambdas and closures solves OOP's problems in simpler ways. Templates solve parametric polymorphism (or "genericity"), and meta-programming is just a buzzword, as far as C++ is concerned. (When it is not a buzzword, the systems behind are so huge than I wonder if it's worth the effort, see the Boost library.)

3. That one sounds like a lot of work. A high-level and efficient abstraction has to be build from a fairly low level. Efficient memory management for instance, will probably be more complicated than the straightforward (but copy-ridden) RAII scheme.

6. Properly thought out type systems enforce better, and in a simpler way. See Haskell for instance. And even if your high level language is very permissive (Lua, Lisp…), you could still write a custom preprocessor. Not too daunting, as long as the syntax you pre-process isn't C++'s.
Thanks, I hadn't heard of http://sparked.com

Also look at http://catchafire.org/ (something similar)
I particularly like the comment of how service based work is "decent sustenance, but a poor investment".
anyone putting 30 second video ads on the internet just doesn't get it. it's not like tv where you have to recapture the viewer's attention -- they're hyper focused on a single place on the screen. i would imagine a 5-7 second "samsung phone X has features Y and Z" ad would be way more effective if only because people would consume it without immediately closing the window.
I wasn't aware that going from say,

browser -> message

to

browser -> inbox -> message

Would suddenly mean that the browser gets killed. Is this really the case?
>"Throughout the 18th century the National Debt grew and grew, from nothing at the end of the 17th century to about 60 percent of GDP by the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1715."

That's a fifteen-year period, not throughout the 18th century, and for that entire period, England was at war. It's absolutely true: debts help win wars. This isn't surprising: war is one of those times when there's a good argument for borrowing against the future, because the alternative is annihilation. On the other hand, during most periods of peace, historically, debt as a percent of GDP has fallen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent...

The thing is we don't have any more wars worth fighting. Maybe in twenty years the precarious situation of "the largest economy in the world is totalitarian [i.e. China]" will boil over, but that definitely isn't happening any time soon. These days, we just accrue debt for no reason, or to fight a war on nothing (drugs, terror, cancer, tobacco).

Debt by country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Public_debt_percent_gdp_wo...

Growth by country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP_real_growth_rate_CIA_F...

(I wanted to say something about this but I'm having trouble distinguishing between five identical shades of green)
(Duh. I meant of course "low-carb diets are still cheaper")
I wish there was a simple mirror process for Goole+ posts... I can't read them at work.
Like this idea - my office could always use more exercises to do at work.

What do you use to send out the emails?
Astrid gets investment from Google Ventures
I'm just bitten by this today: I was trying to get the time zone offset in Python to print the local time for an app.

Doing

date +%z

in console gives me correct offset

+0800

of China (we do not have DST anymore) while doing

import time
time.strftime('%z', time.localtime())

gives me

+0706

WTF??!!! I can understand Python might not be able to get the correct timezone info from the system, but giving this kind of obviously incorrect offset is just dumb. Still searching for a solution other than manually configure Python code. If anyone knows why, I would be really glad for your help. Thanks in advance!
That is a very interesting thought. Thank you for mentioning it!
All of that is true if you don't consider inflation and the money supply. Then stuff gets complicated.
Lessons I Have Learned From Selling Software Online
It's mostly sufficient. /21000/ will not match "http://picolisp.com/21000, which is the first URL in the sequence, but the remaining URLs look like "http://picolisp.com/21000/!start?*Page=+2, so Googlebot will likely only continue to download a single page once it has re-read the robots.txt.

Which is what you deserve for using non-standard URL formats.
Hardly "massive" - his code is a single file with 108 sloc.
The Best Natural Male Enhancement Blog | Men’s Health Institute
Our best natural male enhancement blog is your #1 source of information on erectile dysfunction, penile enlargement, male enhancement tips, reviews and advice.
> Imagine if nuclear silos were built today and powered by Windows and attached to the internet - insane, right?

You are in for some surprises:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987

The US military-industrial complex isn't really there for national defense, or even for the conquest of weaker nations. Rather, it is a massive wealth transfer scheme. Microsoft fits right in.
"I'll do a little play on words here. Are you saying that biology isn't logical? Does it defy the laws of the universe, physics, and the axioms in math?"

No, he's saying that biology isn't human-designed. Human designs have several characteristics that stem from our limited cognition and limited ability to hold things in our heads at one time. Our designs tend to be highly modular, with distinct parts interacting in distinct ways, and with the failure of one part generally capable of taking the whole system down. There will generally be some clear separation of layers, with each layer having a distinct and clear responsibility. There is generally one way to accomplish something, or failing that, some very small set of ways. Our designs have to be this way, we can't deal with unabstracted systems, even at relatively small sizes.

To the extent that you immediately think of some piece of software that violates all of this, you also will notice that software is also pretty much end-of-lifed. We can't build in any other way for very long.

Biology doesn't work that way. Yes, there are parts you can identify, but they aren't like human-designed parts, either. They freely run all the way across the "abstraction hierarchy", such as it is. If evolution made it so that this one function that you think ought to be done by the kidneys is actually done by blood vessels, so be it. Even drawing lines around "functions" is quite difficult when you get down to it, the deeper you go and the more precise you try to make the line, the more of the body you end up implicating. It's all just jumbled together, with redundant pathways for everything.

We know about the "functions" of things that we know about precisely because we are looking for them in the first place. We have a cognitive bias (in the machine learning sense of a bias induced by what we are capable of even expressing in our heads in the first place, not the usual English sense of bias) for these things, so that's what we find. But whereas in human designs these functions are real (we made them that way), in biology they are only approximations. To the extent you look at a system in the human body and see something with clear, well-defined parts, that's because you can't really perceive the full complexity of what's actually there, not because it isn't complex and quite tangled.

And I gotta tell you, having my brain scanned and converted into an approximation of its original state that will use an approximation of how brains work is a bit of an intimidating prospect.
I believe that the money lent to Greece is just being funneled back to banks to pay their existing debt obligations. The so called bailout for Greece is really a bailout for banks. Everyone knows Greece will never pay back these loans. The hope of the ECB is that a Greek default can be pushed long enough into the future so that when it does default the banks will be in better financial shape. The fear is that right now the banking system can't handle a Greek default.
Manual Article Submission Services | Best Article Marketing Strategy
Gold is a natural resource, so it's not really a financial asset. Coins containing gold are liabilities of the issuing government just like any other type of coin.

I hope you do not seriously believe that the reason gold is not used for trade is that governments suppress it. The fact is that using gold is actually extremely impractical compared to modern forms of payment.

The use of gold in trade in the past developed naturally because sufficiently stable fiat money systems did not exist. However, once such fiat money systems do exist, they are simply better and there is no reason left to use gold as a medium of exchange (outside of goldbugdom).
> Government spec motherboards shouldn't even have usb headers.

The first military to try to order such custom, extremely expensive (no alternative market for it!) gear will be flogged and quartered alive by the press. For spending 10 or 100 times as much as CotS hardware would cost.

Good luck finding a soldier brave enough to risk his career and family's income for mere USB ports.
The World of 7 Billion (Infographics)
> There are no alpha/beta males in human society. An overwhelming majority of males get access to females.

This is absolutely false. What percentage of our ancestors were women? It isn't 50%. Half of the people who ever lived were women, but thats certainly not the case for all the people who ever lived and have a descendant living today.

Thanks to DNA analysis we know that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

To get that kind of difference, the figures have to be something like: Throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

In other words, most human males who ever lived do not have descendants who are alive today.
No, but I see no reason that that makes any more sense, the user experience is that they navigate to their browser, surf, drop directly into a message and then go back. Especially since I think you're still thinking about things from an old mindset where users use the homescreen to switch apps. That's fine, but for those of us that want to leverage Android multitasking (and presumably iOS multitasking allows you to jump back into an application via the multitasking pane), it's nice that we have a "history" so to say of our
"session".

Not to mention that this simply wouldn't work in Android. If another application is launched via an Intent... and I press the back button and just return to a new level inside the launched application... I'm going to be peeved. Like, I'm removing the app irritated. I'm actually not sure a developer can even do that, thank god.

Why would you want to insert a new activity in the "back button history" that the user never visited? I was be distraught and am when applications screw with the Activity flow is messed with. The Google Voice app is notorious for stacking activities incorrectly to where it makes the back button useless.

That's why I prefer devs let Android handle it. The default behavior allows users to use their phones like iPhones (in terms of just going home -> app all the time) but also allows us to quickly switch into and back out of quick things like checking an email or replying to a text.
Judging from the article title, the name of the publication, and the posters new username, they aren't exactly a disinterested party. Shrillness can be expected from True Believers, IME.
It's also common sense to pick the right plugins for the job.

There are a lot of modules which have been deprecated or which are no longer maintained, sure.
However, this doesn't mean that Drupal is in any way bad.
I don't think it's widely used. The average site that doesn't want to provide their own username is using Facebook nowadays. Stack Overflow etc. seems to be the only bigger site that uses it, and it's kind of a mess over there.
i disagree. unit tests help when learning a new language, because you can write a test for one very specific piece of functionality and then use it to test whether you've got things right.

in the example given, don't mock out the file system, just use it. hard-code your paths. you can go back and fix that later - what you're doing now is getting basic tests sketched out so that you can learn.

so you're confusing "learning a language" with "writing a complete, portable system". of course you can't do the latter while doing the former - you need to make compromises. but ignoring tests is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. perfect is being the enemy of good.

[and i am not just bullshitting here - last week i was learning go and this is exactly what i did. the go getting started docs are very clear about how to run tests, and having tests to check i was understanding really helped.]
http://www.minix3.org/
but do they earn that in a year on average ? i doubt it.
http://www.wdyl.com/#lamp
Vision Helpdesk Showcasing V3 at HostingCon 2011
Scoble's Top Ten
I'd just like to point out in reference to his Galileo quote that there would still be a need for time zones even if the sun revolved around the earth.
PHP to deprecate MySQL extension
This makes sense. If you work yourself to the bone just to be successful and putting yourself in the position to compete with other "alphas," you're going to be stressed. And you're not going to fight your competitors to the death over a job or female baboon — you have to play by society's rules, which attempts to equalize us to some degree.

Human civilization, of course, is far too complex to reduce people to just alpha or beta. But some people still like to think of it that way. Which is why I'm thinking of starting a "beta pride" movement: We're less stressed, we rarely end up in prison and we still manage to find mates once in a while.

Who's with me?
I don't see why a special spec would be necessary, you could just physically disable the usb drive.
The question I have (almost always when reading things like this) is what are the real advantages to a language being both static and dynamic?

The only thing that I can think of is that you can have a type system, but then ignore that whenever you want. But even as I write that it feels like I've made a mistake.
Nurhadi.Info
I see some unique yools from this site. So its looking Very Nice.
Great it!!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/16/windows_for_submarin...

Blighty's nuclear-missile-equipped submarines, now running MS Windows.

BSOD anybody?
I think it's telling that almost every comment is talking about a different format than PDF.

Writers, this is something to prepare for!
The person who wrote that article doesn't seem to have such great technical skills.
He came off as the classic blogger who feels he has to share his opinion about everything without having taken the time to actually write some PHP code, to build a site with Drupal or otherwise.
Microsoft Accused Of Stealing Kinect From Columbian Inventor
Ruby 1.9.2-p290 Released
Lorem Ipsum Generators: How To Make Your Dummy Text More Fun
Because it undermines the narrative they wanted to publicize. Now that the narrative is well established they can release the full logs and it won't even make a dent in broad opinion.
Yeah, design can be tricky. I'm horrible when it comes to graphics, but I've learned basic stuff about UI design, whitespace, colors, etc. that I can put together a not-horrible-looking design. I outsource logo creation to crowdSPRING. You can also consider buying a premium HTML theme as well.
I do believe governments and central banks would like to suppress its use, though I wouldn't claim that's the only reason it isn't used in transactions today. It's in their interests to suppress its use because it's one way to spend more than they take in as revenue by issuing new currency. I think we're seeing the results of that globally today.

As to gold being impractical for use in everyday transactions, I don't think that's true anymore. You can look at companies like Goldmoney for a real world example of what is possible. Any trusted third party can hold the physical gold, while allowing electronic transactions of said gold in whatever increments, without any physical exchange taking place. In fact, this is generally how the dollar worked before it went off the gold standard.

I'm not sure why you think fiat money is better. The history of fiat money has been one of short lifespans and dramatic failures, while gold's history of use as money spans over 6,000 years.
More dangerous than debt is a political system which accepts broke countries into a monetary union when these countries just downright faked their economic statistics and noone did any due-diligence or found out only until years later when it was too late.
I'm waiting for the Pre 3 to come out then evaluating- I have a Nexus One right now and I'm getting a little tired of Android's glitchiness. I'm seriously considering WebOS or Windows Phone next, for something a little "different" (more chance I could make an app that doesn't already exist, too)

...that said, I'm still concerned about WebOS's long term development. I just don't trust that HP can continue to innovate.
Have to like this---it is a requirement if you own all of their T-shirts...
More invites:

eFMdM7wGPrfLp6NS
enfhEfpKZtBzkf4C
dNBTY4m6M5VKX9Ka
b8JEmUeCEhW6s3Bh
a8dNutpMMBSRSXMV
>In theory it should, of course, be the creditors. You buy an asset (govt bonds), you're implicitly and knowingly shouldering a risk of default. The institutions that bought these assets should have known what they were buying. Caveat Emptor.

Indeed. But the reason why you try to avoid a default (or the prospect of one) is that you want to continue to borrow money to finance your deficit spending. Otherwise you get the worst of both worlds: forced austerity and creditors that want nothing to do with you without high interest rates.
"to do that now"?... What would be a good time to break the majority of smaller sites on the Internet?...
I am very close to ignoring all stories whose headline is a question.
I think this is a specialized instance of the general advice to not test code which has not yet been written. If you're writing a test ahead of the code which it tests, you'd better have every single line of that code already written in your head.
Meh. They're just talking about deprecating it on the 5.4 horizon so far, not going to break anything
I can assure you I am not thinking of using the homescreen in that way, since I never experienced android when it worked that way.

In the context of checking inboxes, adding an "inbox" activity does make sense, especially if you receive multiple notifications. Although I don't see why there couldn't be a way for the inbox activity to only be added when necessary.
Yes, I can't wait to see this technology available at the consumer level. In combination with a personal body-model it will allow us to enter a truly customizable marketplace for clothing (though there would need to be attention to material-specific design - silk falls completely differently to cotton, for example).
16 of Top 20 Phones Run Android on Millenniall's Network
Agree for very well specified projects where the amount of time a project will take can be easily be predicted and so a suitable fixed fee identified.

In an ideal world all projects might look like that but in practice I think there's a chunk which don't. Agreeing fixed fees for these can be a horrible productivity killer because the estimates will tend to be way off and an "it's impossible to do this in the time/ budget allocated so why both trying" mindset can set in which de-motivates everyone working on it.

In this environment I think fixed fee can encourage corner cutting so for me it's about taking projects on a case by case basis and deciding whether fixed fee or time and materials is appropriate based on how predictable the scope and workload will be.
Thoughts on Google Chrome OS
So was Mario64 http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphic...
Why not just order regular boards, cut the USB headers off with wire cutters and fill the ports with epoxy? That should prevent any casual thumbdrive usage.

The only hangup I see with that is that most boards don't have PS/2 anymore and you might need to connect a keyboard/mouse. To solve that you might need to epoxy a wireless transmitter into one of the ports and pair it with mice/keyboards as needed. But for situations where wireless devices are not allowable, I can't see any cheap solution short of soldering the USB wires to the motherboard. Damn USB for being so... universal.
I'm confused what this has to do with Mashable. They truly do just report on anything that will gather page views at this point, don't they?
Developer uses wrong tool for the job, complains on blog. When you're learning a new language, learn the language. The code you're writing during learning probably isn't worth keeping around anyways (it's likely non-idiomatic and carries over habits of other languages).

Once you feel comfortable and want to write something a bit more stable, bring in unit tests if you feel the need. I find tests great for establishing how I want the API to be since the test is API-in-use and quickly shows flaws in ease-of-use. But, if you're just learning you don't need that extra layer on top of all the other things you're trying to learn.
Yes, absolutely. I was going to add an edit to this effect. Damned if they do, damned if they don't. Anyway the running of these deficits _does_ need to be curbed. It's clear that Greece has been pretty terrible at collecting taxes and managing it's finances. Even now with "Austerity" the UK is still spending £4 for every £3 it earns. Austerity just means "slow the increase in debt". In fact it's prob not even a first-order change, but second order: slow the rate of increase!

Edit: don't know why you've been dv'd, your point is absolutely relevant.
This isn't OpenCourseWare, it is a paid service.
Why Add a Partner when You Can Finance Your Large Orders?
Interaction in Smart Environments
The widespread use of computing technology raises the need for interactive systems that adapt to user, device and environment. Multimodal user interfaces provide the means to support the user in various situations and to adapt the interaction to the user’s needs.
Debt is a mechanism for moving risk around

Much more fundamentally, it is a mechanism for moving things around -- tangible capital like tools and buildings. Interest is in part a payment for risk of default, but it is also payment for use of capital (the debtor gets to use it, the creditor gives up his ability to use it). There would still be interest even if there were no risk at all.
Piotr,

That was a brilliant talk, thanks for linking that.
I love the way the guy had to take us at great length through how the vending machine actually worked--as if us mere mortals who work at places that aren't tech giants have never bought a Mars bar!
The key to enforce const correctness is to reverse the default behaviour. Make everything const by default, scrap "const", and introduce "mutable" (or "assignable", or something).

The result hopefully won't feel like a nano-management attempt, while people will think twice before they make anything "mutable".
VentureGeeks Unveils Five Pre-Seed Investments in Israel
Would like to see the same for the 'memcache' lib, which is way older and slower than 'memcached'. The older lib comes up first in most search results and there's no real way for a new PHP user to know the difference.