skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since 1.5 you can use the `Arrays` built-in [1]:

List<String> people = Arrays.asList("Frank", "Mary", "Bob");

[1] http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/A...
Namely, the increase in specialization as one advances.
you certainly have no right to criticize me for refusing to do so.

On the contrary, I have every right to criticize you for doing so. Why wouldn't I have that right?
To click or not to click...that is the test.
"In a sense, all possible computer programs for a given architecture are implied in that architecture, even if they haven't been written yet - just like all possible novels are implied by the letters of the alphabet, even if they haven't been written yet."

Surely you realize that all possible patents are implied by the alphabet in precisely the same manner that all possible novels are implied by the existence of the alphabet...? :)
>Computers aren't mathematical constructs.

A particular computer is not a mathematical construct. The concept of a computer, however, is a mathematical construct; there are no physical characteristics necessary to identify something as a "computer" for the purposes of e.g. arithmetic coding. I could perform arithmetic coding with nothing but a pen and an extremely large amount of paper.
Ask HN: how do US software contracting rates compare to UK?
Here's daily rates in Dublin / London for development contractors (figures below are consistent with my experience, people I know and recruitment agencies):

* Dublin: 400-500 EUR/day = 570 - 715 USD/day
* London: 400-600 GBP/day = 653 - 980 USD/day

How does this compare to contracting rates in major US cities?
That may be a bug with that particular problem - you should click the "Report a Problem" link at the bottom of the exercise and copy-and-paste what you just aid here, there. At best the problem isn't being clear that it's looking for a reduced form - at worst we should be trying to exclude other possibly valid answers. Thanks!
Where's Altavista? :)
I commend the author for re-implementing basic typing for Ruby, but this example completely misses the point. If the client to User asks whether a user is an admin of a project before asking if it is a member of that project, the client code is broken already.
The closest equivalent to a voluntary, publicized DDoS is a sit-in.

Is it? Participating in a sit-in is about the same thing as signing a confession and begging the police to haul you to the judge. A DDoS is a shadow crime with elements of failure to report a crime (hiding behind a distant IP address) and betrayal (ISP ToS), with elements of malicious premeditation (geographic distribution, covert command and control network).

... the participants and organizers are going to be dealt with an order of magnitude more harshly than if they'd done the same thing minus a computer.

If you could secretly conduct a sit-in of, say, all Bank of America offices using a spoon, the FBI would most certainly drop the hammer on you. And the terms of your parole, if you ever got out, would most certainly ban you from using utensils.
Some Drug Patents cost the companies who discovered them hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions of dollars. The period of time might stretch over decades, require hundreds of researchers, and involved thousands and thousands of wrong turns. These drugs will never be created by private enterprise without the monopoly protection of a patent - so we either forego future development of those drugs, or socialize the process.

On the flip side, I find it hard to put Drug Patents into the same category as a software patent that three engineers with a half-formed idea can sketch out in a period of a couple days, and then finish off with two or three round trips to the patent office.

I (and this is where I probably disagree with Stallman) think that truly, truly innovative algorithms, such as public key encryption, should be greatly rewarded for a limited time as a result of being shared with everyone.

But - "One Click Purchase" - a process that any high school student with knowledge of cookies could have invented in under 45 minutes if asked to, does not meet that bar.

So - put me in the "For non-obvious patents" column.
Where does linkbaiting rate on this scale?
S3 Patents that Apple Violated Were Ruled Unpatentable
... and what does not come up as the first result for "decision"?
IBM PC was proprietary as well. "IBM PC-compatible" clones with reverse-engineered BIOS were made despite IBM, not thanks to them.
That's a helluva crashblossom. I can't parse the headline at all.
I feel like trademarks aren't quite as screwed up. Trademarking colors is completely broken, but I don't think everything is. I think "Dropbox" is a reasonable name. While it's obviously been used in the past, it was not widely used, and it has not been used as a brand. I think it's reasonable to allow a company to use it. I also think that anyone who previously used the term should be allowed to continue to use the term indefinitely (but not as branding).

I think Filesanywhere is outright trolling, as they never tried to establish the term as a brand. They have a legitimate claim to use the term, and to dispute Dropbox's claim, but not a legitimate claim to the domain. The domain existed 4 years before the Filesanywhere product launched.

Patents on the other hand are appearing more and more broken. 99% of software patents are crap, and probably 100% of "business method" patents are.
Isn't this somewhat simliar to how Microsoft funded SCO to sue companies that used Linux? Microsoft didn't want to be in the position of suing their customers, so they used SCO as a shell to do their dirty work for them.
That's not the point, the point is that Maybe is the right way to handle what nil (or None or null) fails to handle properly. Scala gets it right too, IIRC, with Nullable.

1. A "null" instance of one type should not be conflated with a "null" instance of a separate type.
2. By type-wrapping in a Maybe, you declare where you need to be able to handle nulls and where you are free to ignore them (but can never pass them in). You confine the null to specific regions of your code.
3. You force your code's clients to think about the null case wherever you make it visible.
Persian cooking lesson with mum
So deceptive. For every 8 grams of protein in some peanuts, there are an additional 6 grams of carbs and 14 grams of fat, for a total of 170 calories.
This study almost seems believable until you read the last paragraph. Since when are Web Standards "common knowledge"? How does understanding how IQ relates to browser choice help IT companies save the extra money they spend making websites work in IE? And does this conclusion mean that only IT companies have websites, or only IT companies invest the extra money to make them work in IE?

I didn't click on the IQ test... but I did click on the study. Dang.
Look Out Android and iOS, Here Comes Alibaba's Aliyun
>Software patents are ... not a constitutional question

A constitutional argument could be made that software is not covered by the term "useful Arts". In fact, Justice Scalia suggested that the business-method patent in Bilksi might be invalidated on this ground during oral arguments:

> JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, if the government says that the -- that the term on which it hangs its hat is the term "useful arts" and that that meant, originally, and still means manufacturing arts, arts dealing with workmen, with -- you know, inventors, like Lorenzo Jones, not -- not somebody who writes a book on how to win friends and influence people. What is wrong with [the] analysis, that ..."useful arts" ... always was thought to deal with machines and inventions?
How to Build a Professional Network You Can Be Proud Of
I hope we do, but it seems to me that a lot of components of an electric car will depend directly or indirectly to oil, that it will be like saying that if we run out of water, we can always drink coke.
So, they claim this has much lower latency than WiFi, on the order of 1ms and yet they need a round-trip /over the internet/ to their datacenter to generate a waveform. That AP-Datacenter communication inherently adds more latency than a WiFi link. What am I missing?
I could perform arithmetic coding with nothing but a pen and an extremely large amount of paper.

BUT a pen and paper. A patent wouldn't be just the algorithm, but also a writing device and paper.

Everything is a theoretical until you do it in practice. You can't patent a cool 3D rendering algorithm. But you can patent a device that uses it and renders the output to a computer screen. This is how patents are written.
Thanks for pointing out the try method (it is important to note that it is avaible to anyone using Active Support, not only Rails apps).

It is mildly different (syntax mostly). All of these are attempts to recreate the elvis operator tha Groovy[1] (nowadays present as the The Existential Operator in Coffescript[2]) have.

For better chaining, the Maybe monad can be implemented in Ruby[3]. However they really shine on Haskell and Scala because they have, respectively, do notation and for comprehensions, which effectively work (on this restricted case of handling nulls) as a scope were nulls are ignored.

Doing this with ruby is possible, but requires AST metaprogramming[4], which is the sort of thing that LISP macros do (and is quite suitable to accomplish in LISP[6], as it is homoiconic[5], while Ruby isn't).

[1] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Operators#Operators-ElvisOperator...

[2] http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/#operators

[3] http://pretheory.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/the-maybe-monad-in...

[4] http://metaphysicaldeveloper.wordpress.com/2010/10/31/rubyun...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoiconicity

[6] http://onclojure.com/2009/03/06/a-monad-tutorial-for-clojure...
Yup, because if Steve Jobs wants something but the team pushes back, he'll abandon the idea.
I don't think the trash is a good analogy. I think the proper analogy is something like:

Me: I'm going to start working on my PhD tomorrow.

My wife, tomorrow: Did you finish your PhD yet?

Me: Lol wut?
But the OS was licensed to IBM. MS could sell it to any HW vendor. The HW, with respect to the OS, wasn't proprietary. The MacOS wasn't simply licensed to run on Macs, it was built by Apple to only run on Macs. Despite some toe dips, there never any attempt to really license it.

The mistake IBM made wasn't the HW. It was that they let MS license them the OS on a non-exclusive basis. A genius move when you consider it -- most people would have had little belief there'd be a huge MS-DOS market once IBM entered the fold.
smart idea, cool app, very handy to have all music in one place
>I find it's always useful, when determining the legitimacy of a given political tactic, to assume that it's being used by someone we hate rather than someone we like. So let's suppose the Westboro Baptist Church gets up one morning and decides to target businesses owned by gays. If they do this via sit-in, then they can probably only target one business at a time, and they have to sit around all day getting jeered at. But if they do it via DDoS, they can take down businesses at their leisure.

>These are both illegal and illegitimate forms of political protest, but the DDoS is potentially much worse than the sit-in.

I believe you overestimate the power of DDoS. Lest you forget: well over 1000 people were involved in the attacks. This is just the 1000 most notorious. If the Westboro Baptist Church had thousands of adherents, they could indeed take down many businesses via sit-ins. However, they only have a few.

It takes a lot of people to voluntarily DDoS a large website. Perhaps several thousand. This is enough to shut down a whole lot of restaurants.
This is a pretty laughable basis for comparison - anyone with more than a trivial knowledge of GPUs knows that the largest bottleneck is the bandwidth between system memory and GPU memory, and you are always supposed to design your program with this in mind. Doing a trivial benchmark like taking the sin of one number is not only a pointless operation to attempt on the GPU, but not even a good benchmark of real world GPU applications. GPUs are only good at certain things, and tend to rely on producing data on their end (procedurally), or working with the same set of data over thousands of frames or instances. If you took the sin of the results recursively, and did this a million times over, the GPU would blow the CPU out of the water. What you are claiming is like saying that one CPU is faster than another because one reads from memory and the other from the harddisk.
But I believe the US uses Common Law (English) and not Civil law (France and many other places) system for these matters. So judge can in the US (btw IANAL) decide if a law is valid or not based on constitutionality and previous laws.
Yeah, I did the search, saw google.com.au first and wasn't surprised at all.

For those interested, but not interested enough to visit the AU site the results are:
1. www.google.com.au
2. www.bing.com
3. jobsearch.gov.au
4. www.dogpile.com
5. www.seek.com.au
6. www.search.com
7. www.webwombat.com.au
8. au.altavista.com
9. www.peoplesearch.com.au
10. www.search.org.au

Basically a bunch of search engines, a couple of job sites and a couple of sites with search in their name.
This time for sure :)
Yeah, there was a brief window in the mid-90's when Dogpile was definitely in the top 2. It replaced Metacrawler as my main search for a few months, as I recall.
Five reasons Android is superior to the iPhone
> On the contrary, I have every right to criticize you for doing so. Why wouldn't I have that right?

This is either:

1. Someone facetiously arguing semantics.

2. Someone who believes that their pet cause trumps all others.

Either way, it's a discussion ender.
A monad tutorial for Clojure programmers
Highly speculative. Conversely, maybe there's some subtle, innate quality that higher IQ people appreciate about certain browsers.

Either way, as an Opera user, I have some ammunition next time I find myself in a childish browser argument ;)
Ubuntu one sync just sits there and eats ram until i kill it. Very annoying. Not impressed.
They still take up to a year to release the changes they made to khtml for a given iOS release.
and the second question is always "what do you do?" and, up until very recently, answering with "I work at a web startup" was met with extremely puzzled and questioning looks.
I'm a big fan of Lua's use of nil and the simplified error handling (No exception 'types') in that language. I think the problem with 'typing' Exceptions is that it means you are using it to record and pass describable\known state similar to return, instead of being reserved for unknown state. For indicating predictable failure states without using exceptions, I think multiple return values is a much better paradigm. Here's what happens when you open a non-existent file in Lua:

=io.open 'sdfasdf'
nil	sdfasdf: No such file or directory	2

The first value returned is nil, the 2nd value is a string containing an error message, and the 3rd is an integer error code. This allows you to write most code using 2 state boolean logic:

f=io.open 'sasdasdfsf'
if f then -- nil is a boolean 0

whereas in Python, one often has to reason about 3 states by using the try\except blocks. Even though you are not using typed Exceptions, multiple return values does not discard any state about the error if it is desired:

f, err = io.open 'sasdasd'
print(err)

I believe this also the design decision Google's Go language has made: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#multiple-returns
Non-software products are quite complicated once you look beneath the surface, e.g. even a cheap toaster has 400 parts
http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast... . Sure, the number of distinct parts would be lower (perhaps 100), they tend to involve more mature technology for which any patents might have now expired, and the toaster manufacturer probably buys many of the parts rather than manufacturing them themselves, but I would think that the odds of an advanced hardware product accidentally hitting a patent are significantly more than nil.
very interesting. It sounds like they are precomputing the streams into a single stream so that the interference at a given location only has to be calculated against background noise and not other signals. So in other words its not one signal overriding eachother, because there is only one signal at a given location and all devices know how to eavesdrop their signal out of the master one. Interesting concept.
I'd like to see the war on drugs added.
It's really not irrelevant.

There's a reason that people aren't programming in COBOL or BASIC.
You can get two lines and bond them.
Weird, I think I went to college with him.
The 3DS is an interesting venture. The problem is that it introduced fragmentation and uncertainty into an established and active platform without really achieving the perceived benefits of the migration.

Users almost never flock to your new version en masse. Assume they won't. If they do, awesome, but base your projections on the assumption that they won't.
Vehicle Physics in WebGL using GLGE and JigLibJS
Verizon & AT&T have grown almost a 50% in 5 years, while Sprint is flat
This person is very smart, but (as far as I can tell) he's never instructed everyday students before - is that a problem?
> How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream?

Do you have any idea how much crap they are getting for that? People made a stink, and they learned their lesson.
Watch,winnie the pooh,online free,megavideo
watch,winnie the pooh,online free,megavideo
On the basis of its decision, for example, for someone who is fascinated to enjoy a comedy or a Disney movie, you will be able to discover them on websites. All you have to do is choose films based on different types
shouldn't that be

Try Scala! (So do I ;))

then?
The problem with this is when you do something stupid. Let's say your GetFrobz interface is missing something, or requires a parameter it doesn't really need, or just stupidly keeps state around to provide a feature that's not important. If you don't have versioning, but want to replace this, you have to call it something different.

So now you have GetFrobz and FetchFrobz and you need to tell everyone to not use GetFrobz in new applications.

This really does happen. The first example that comes to mind: is POSIX random numbers (rand,random,drand48), but there are loads of others anywhere that backwards compatibility is deemed important.
By the way, the term for the ratio "arithmetic computations per memory access", which a lot of the comments here are referring to, is "arithmetic intensity". (We used to say "computational intensity" but that term is even more confusing.) Low arithmetic intensity problems are going to be bottlenecked on memory transfer time, especially for GPGPU, and I'm surprised to see that the GPU doesn't come out quite a bit worse in the comparison for this low-arithmetic-intensity problem. Maybe he should have picked a simpler operation than sine if he wants to make his CPU look more awesome — reciprocal, say. Take the reciprocal of 10 million random numbers.
MongoHQ Acquires MongoMachine
A key paragraph:

"You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue."

The point of nonviolent activism isn't to harm someone else or their economic well-being (though the latter is often a side effect). It's to force a rupture or break in the institutions of a community to resolve what King calls an underlying tension in that community. By forcing people in power to use violence against nonviolence, it disrupts the ruling ideology by pointing out its hypocrisy and forcing action by threatening the breakdown of the social order predicated on that ideology.

Of course, a neo-Nazi may well try a sit down, but that's likely to be ineffective as it's not exploiting any inherent tension and isn't going to cause any huge community squabbles that have the potential to degenerate into violence.

As to why it's okay to threaten the social order... well, in effect because laws and order exist to establish justice, and we are compelled by moral law to oppose unjust laws. Which is, you might say, just saying we should do this because this is right. Perhaps. But it's a difficult proposition to say every action can be be considered individually and judged without moral context. Occupied Resistance in WW2 fought the Nazis and broke many laws (including not just vandalism but murder). A slave in pre-Civil War America who ran away, and anyone who helped that slave run away, was breaking many federal and state laws, as well as seriously disrupting the economy and commerce. Those were unjust situations, though, and so it was right.
I stand corrected. Chrome has gotten really fast since worked with canvas (last year).
Even though it may be good policy for the Supreme Court to act that way, that's a separate question from whether they in fact do operate in that way.

There is extensive literature (a subset of "legal realism" which accounts strategically for judicial action) which claims that judges do in fact incorporate policy considerations in decision-making. Secondly, it's widely acknowledged that the court frequently and with considerable influence advises Congress to change the law. In that context, it might be fine & useful for this article to speak in policy terms to the Court.
That statement does not make sense even by pg's own logic. He says that patents play a small role in software compared to other industries. Yet opposing software patents means you must oppose all patents?

I think there is a decent case that software patents are uniquely broken, both practically and theoretically, and (net) harmful, while some others are (net) beneficial, such as pharmaceutical patents. So I think it's fine to be against software patents but not against other types.

"Only the Sith deal in absolutes"
"Open" at the very least means "interoperable". FaceTime is neither open source nor an open standard right now.
I would argue that that is in practice their job, especially given the amount of ambiguity, both unavoidable and superfluous, in the legislation-as-written. I actually have a very strong dislike for Scalia because I think that his legal 'originalist' philosophy is pretty much like biblical 'literalism' - it's an interpretation that is (a) convenient to him and (b) denies the validity of all other interpretations in an underhanded way.