skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's hard to explain to a novice that in Perl 4/5, $x[42] dereferences @x, not $x (which are completely separate, except when they're not because of (star)x).

(I don't know how to protect the star from starting an emphasise block. Escaping it doesn't seem to work.)

Sorry to nit-pick, but these may be particularly hard to explain because they're not true.

$x[42] isn't a de-reference at all, but an indexing. (Granted, it's more than a little confusing that it's indexing @x. This is 'fixed' in Perl 6.) $x->[42] is a de-reference, but of $x, not of @x (which isn't a reference anyway (I think unlike in Ruby)). @x and $x are always completely separate; typeglobs allow you to say something like (star)x = \@y, whereupon @x and @y are the same (but still $x and @x are completely different). I suppose you could claim that $x and @x are no longer completely different if you say something like $x = \@x, whereupon $x->[42] and $x[42] mean the same thing.
If public education is not a monopoly, what is it?
There are a few Github orgs that you may want to look at:

https://github.com/GMOD
https://github.com/solgenomics

Also, #bioinformatics on freenode is a good place to meet people.
Surprised by the lack of rdio responses.

Most of my twenty-something friends in SF and NY prefer rdio over spotify.
A friend of mine from college started this project without any anticipation of how large it would be. Good example of the immediate success that can be derived from fulfilling an unmet (and perhaps not previously even considered) desire.
"Sequoia, that's a great question, but it's a bit advanced and I've got 30 other students here. I can't spend a lot of time answering advanced questions when half the class is struggling with basic concepts.""

Yep, that happened when I TA'd CS 1. I managed to coopt some of the brighter students into helping the others, but, well, it didn't do much for them inasmuch they wanted to learn CS (they just got some social polishing).

Really a pity. :-/
>"What's the reason that everyone seems obsessed over getting more women into programming?"

Because a greater diversity of life experience leads to better design, usability, and implementation. Women are users, too, and when women devs have input into interfaces intended to be used by women, the product can be much better for it. Obviously there are other ways to incorporate women, children, the elderly with user acceptance testing and usability reviews, but why wouldn't you want that kind of diversity and insight on your team?
Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond, the NASA MMO Online Game
Imagine you are going to class of 100 students, 99 of which are women. It is fairly awkward, like walking into a men's club. Because I am generally quiet, mostly the guys pretended I wasn't there (definitely, better than the alternative.) They would talk about things I had no interest listening to - rated various women, and more innocent things like football. Anyway, every time I walked into that room I felt like I was intruding.
And I think if you were to walk into a room with 99 women you would feel awkward as well.
From my perspective, as a woman software engineer - there is no "perhaps" about it.
Fun read - I especially liked the last statement of the interview:

>> Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering. When you finally get done and get to appreciate what you have done it is like a part of yourself that you've put together. I think a lot of the people here feel that way.
Wouldn't the analog(ue) be framing? Just because one can frame people (on-line or IRL) doesn't mean the system is flawed. It just means there are people out there willing to have someone else be the fall-person as an end, or as a distraction to buy time in order to escape (or allow the trail of evidence to tail off/go cold.)
Probably mostly the Hawthorne effect; making "any" change tends to lead to temporary improvements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
In a different context, I remember "Redmond, start your photocopiers!" That's Apple knowing they were going to be copied, but being supremely confident that it wouldn't matter because they'd stay far enough ahead anyway. I don't think I've seen that particular side of Apple in a while.
Agreed. It just quotes something from the original article without really adding anything new.
That's true. Unless someone builds a lighter, more accurate hammer in the meantime.
The translation for App Store appears to be 'native apps'.
So I read the original post (well, I skimmed it) and then your response. My first impulse was to decide you're an asshole blah blah, and I start discussing the topic with my wife who is doing grant-funded research on this topic (she's a social psychologist).

So the big obstacles to women in a lot of professions are social norms (like sexist behavior, people refusing to hire you because you're not the kind of person they expect, or career structures that force women to choose between work and having children) and stereotype threat (fear of one's conduct reflecting badly on the group to which one belongs).

To take the real estate agent example: the business may have a lot of sexist jerks (I imagine they're better at pretending not to be though, since they are selling stuff) but there are plenty of good norms (e.g. real estate agents generally have very flexible schedules). And there's no problem with stereotype threat -- women aren't widely considered to be bad at talking to people and selling houses.

TV shows have a huge impact on stereotype threat (and probably norms as well). E.g. there are plenty of shows on TV that show women being successful doctors and lawyers without failing socially. (These are also, to some extent, professions involving helping people and communicating -- which women are stereotypically good at.) The same cannot be said for software development (which isn't portrayed much on TV, and when it is stretches credulity).

I think that there's one thing I can say for certain: the reason sexist jerks are prominent in the software business is that they're allowed to be. There's no question that if more women were in the industry there would be less tolerance of sexist jerks, but getting women into the industry is probably as much a problem of addressing stereotype threat, tokenism, etc. as it is combating norms.

Meanwhile, sexist jerks aren't helping. So call them on it.
Wasn't topiary supposedly the guy who was doing the interview during which the WBC got hacked? If so, they have his voice on tape. Certainly wasn't British. At the time I thought French, but Swedish would fit.

The slightly annoying thing is that we may never know. The real topiary is not going to reappear if they've arrested the wrong guy. The police are certainly not going to give up their arrest. And presumably they've got this guy in custody on something. So I assume they can make the charges stick. I'm sure they've arrested him under his real name for something he actually did, not topiary for being a member of Lulzsec.

The public certainly don't care. It only matters that justice appears to be done.

So it looks to me like everyone is happy (except the guy who got arrested of course).
Here's another one: Feri Finance AG in Bad Homburg, Germany.

Financial Times Deutschland had a somewhat ironic report on this: http://www.ftd.de/finanzen/maerkte/60063134.html
Have you seen any actual numbers on this? I've googled around a bit and can't seem to find any.
I love what AirBnB is doing - and I know they'll pull through this. But there's one policy of theirs that just needs to change: Stop penalizing hosts for declining reservations

My wife and I used AirBnB to rent out our place in San Francisco very early on in the life of AirBnB. At one point we'd booked about 60 reservations and were making a killing. It was simply wonderful having the freedom of place that AirBnB afforded us. Trip to Hawaii for the weekend? Our rental earnings for just the weekend easily paid off the flight.

We stopped using AirBnB (and renting out our place in general) for a variety of reasons, but the primary reason was safety. We were finding that 9 of 10 reservation requests were from people without AirBnB ratings nor profiles, but the moment you decline a reservation, for any reason (even if you know the person isn't legit), your search ranking drops considerably.

The way AirBnB determines your search ranking for a particular area is directly related to how many successful bookings you've had over a trailing 60 days. This is why the top 50 places in SF right now on AirBnB are "full time" or professionally-managed rentals, and not normal people just renting on the weekends. At one point we were renting out our place consistently almost every weekend, and because airbnb's search interface is so poor, making it into the top 20 for an area resulted in a twentyfold increase in reservations.

The problem then becomes, as a host - do I decline reservations from people I know nothing about and take a rating hit that may prevent me from renting again, or, do I accept the reservation and "trust in humankind" that everything will be ok?

We obviously took the latter road, and for the most part had great interactions with the people we met. However, after a couple of "close calls" - an elderly couple who almost burned our place down and an obviously high-functioning crazy person, we decided that it wasn't worth the risk anymore.

I really want AirBnB to work - and I understand why they maintain this policy of penalizing you for not being generally available, but in light of the recent incident, I hope they rethink it and help promote "real" hosts who don't do this as a business.
yeah but Sun was sold, and other stuff happened. I think it's already great that there is a release with some syntax features that are useful and other nice to have things too. I think Java 8 will come fast there are plenty of new langs now they can't miss the point otherwise companies will continue to migrate to faster evolving languages with faster developing times.
Yow, what the hell was I thinking when I wrote that? Let me try again.

Preliminary note: I'm looking at a draft version of the C9X standard, because that's what I have to hand.

When x is of an unsigned type, it's OK. (In particular, arithmetic overflow on unsigned types is defined to work modulo (max value + 1).)

When x is of a signed type, the bit-patterns corresponding to negative numbers are left somewhat up for grabs. It has to be either sign+magnitude, or 1's-complement, or 2's-complement. (I'm pretty sure this was not true in earlier versions of the standard.)

However, the result of applying a bitwise logical operator to a negative value is defined to be what you get by applying that logical operation to the bits. In other words, it's undefined (actually, unspecified, which isn't quite the same) what answer you get, but this isn't one of those cases where the standard permits implementations to cause the Moon to explode or pornographic email to be sent to your employer.

In particular, whatever value x&(x-1) has when x==0, it has a value and the whole expression (including the && (x!=0) bit) comes out false regardless.

So, I take back my earlier statement: according to my reading of (a draft of) the (latest) C standard, my version is in fact guaranteed to do the right thing in all implementations, even when x is of signed type.

I repeat that I haven't looked at earlier versions of the standard; I think they were less specific about how signed integer types can be represented, and I wouldn't be surprised if bitwise ops on negative numbers (at least) had entirely undefined behaviour then.
What a great interview. Say what you will about Microsoft, Bill Gates is a smart, smart man.

There are so many great quotes in there. Considering the time the interview took place, he did a great job of anticipating what was coming:

* transition of interesting jobs from hardware -> software
* user experience becoming more important than performance
* the importance of networking

Well worth the read.

I was about 2 months old when DOS came out. Can't imagine where I'd be without the PC revolution.
She fun , bollywood news , fashion: Katrina Kaif choses Ranbir over Aamir Khan…
Yes, I think the verbosity I'm complaining about above is the fruit of three of the principles of the Zen of Python:

Explicit is better than implicit.

Errors should never pass silently.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Maybe after I spend more time with Ruby, I'll see the dark side of DSLs, but so far I'm loving it :)
Q What is I-Corps?

A NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) is a public–private partnership that provides grants to determine the technology disposition of concepts developed by previously or currently funded NSF grantees.
Why the guy arrested in Scotland might not be LulzSec's Topiary
This is definitely worth a bookmark. It must've taken some considerable time to create but is of great value. I find it to be a quick reference to see how the languages differ from each other. Very nice.
> some of the descendants are a bit off (Java->Javascript, anyone?)

The page explicitly notes that this is not an inheritance / 'paternity' graph, but rather a description of the (perceived) problems with one language that another language fixes (or tries to).

I don't think there's even any implication that any one language was created in response to any other, just that it shares certain aspects, and removes certain warts.
I disagree. I think there are a lot of promising projects that don't get enough attention because there isn't enough focus on using the research. It's all ivory-tower stuff. There's something magical that happens when you try to turn pure research into actual product: More knowledge!

It's rarely a straightforward thing to do, and I can understand academics not wanting to tackle it. But it really does matter.
Public schools are the ones who cater to the large percentage. And have no real revenue loss when they fail to deliver.

Private schools do cater to a small percentage, not everybody in a neighborhood, but a small percentage to whom the school appeals. Just like any other kind of business.

Mercedes doesn't say "screw those snobs. We want the masses." Nope, they cater specifically to a very small set of buyers.

There's no reason to think there won't be brands of schools targeted at different kinds of students.

But we won't know until people can actually make choices without having to pay for education twice. Most people can't afford to pay the taxes required to support public schools and also pay for tuition. They shouldn't have to.

In old communist Yugoslavia, the government produced one car for all. Without any competition it captured 100% of the market. And it was a piece of crap.

Competition ended that stupidity and hopefully one day it will do the same for education.
A very promising technology I've had the chance to work with is called SwiftFuel. It's based of switchgrass, which is far more sustainable.

The FAA, due to pressure from the EPA, is looking to switch the entire aviation industry to SwiftFuel from low-lead fuels.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avgas#Swift_fuel

SwiftFuel has the advantage of being able to run, in theory, in most/all aircraft engines without modification. (Fuel pumps need to be replaced, however)
And they wonder why some companies don't want to do business in US anymore. US has a lot to fix to bring its economy back.
In Sao Paulo[BR] gas price hit US$5.5/gall a couple of years ago, and I just spotted 5 electric cars in my life, I know we're are so called emergent but Sao Paulo is more similar to some american metropoles than anything in europe or even US.

Our "cheap" alternatine, sugar cane Ethanol it's costing US$4.39/gall. I just filled my VW with gas today and it cost me US$7.20/gall.

Mankind will adopt alternatives as soon we drain global reserves.

I did all conversions because we buy gas in litters
Wow - I completely read this as 'sexiest creeps' and it gave it a whole other connotation.
In other words, they spend money to review the success of projects they've funded. Makes sense to me. How else will you improve your process?
Luck, Bad Luck And The Illusion Of Control
american biofuels: subsidized food burning.
I would expect that if the existing incentives were enough, it would already be happening.

If I have the choice between continuing to do research (work I find interesting) and trying to commercialize research I've already done (work I don't find interesting), then I'm going to need something more than a small chance at a big payout to convince me to do the non-research work. If running a startup were my actual goal, I'd have been at it for a couple of years already.
Segregating pupils by age in school has always been a bad idea, and it has always been known to be a bad idea by careful observers of children and their learning.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

Segregating pupils by age in school began in the English-speaking world (in Massachusetts) as an imitation of the Prussian schools of that time. It was strictly for administrative convenience. It is not at all a cultural or historical universal to group school learners into lock-step groups by age.

After edit: One comment about the author of the submitted article. He is actually a programmer by occupation. When his employee shares of Microsoft stock vested, he turned his good fortune to improving education in the United States. I have known him online for years as a thoughtful contributor to discussions of education policy.

I came to Hacker News by links from Paul Graham's essays

http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

and came to those because pg frequently writes about education policy and has some of his own thoughts about how schools could be better. So I've always expected threads about education policy to be within the Hacker News topic scope of "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Nintendo to slash 3DS price by $80 as Apple gains in mobile gaming
Why do we let sexist creeps pervade the loading docks/road crews/World Bank?
Correction: "Android Now Serves 39% Of the U.S. Smartphone Market"

People choose what kind of phone they're doing to buy. The software cannot and does not choose for them. Even if you substitute "Google" for "Android," the original title still doesn't work.

I know that people will say that this usage of the word has been long established. That much is true, but it isn't my point. The logic behind the usage doesn't make sense, and it interferes with clear thinking on the matter.
INTERCAL -> not funny enough -> LOLCode
I distinctly heard "snicker snicker woman snicker snicker".

I wouldn't have remembered otherwise.
If I recall correct, one of the lead devs of SVN has stated he is fine with svn merge as-is.

How quickly we become our parents. SVN was born as a reaction to the same sort of unwillingness to move forward on the part of the CVS maintainers.
Actual approaches I've seen:

* Trust the submitted data. Sadly, very popular. Of things I've seen lately, Authorize.Net's new Direct Post Method does this, as does the Prolific gateway.

* Have the merchant optionally crypto-sign all the interesting-to-manipulate parts and submit the signature along with. Braintree's old API worked this way, not sure about the current. USAePay does this, but they don't let you sign all the important fields.

* Stripe has your form submit to you, but they use JavaScript to submit the card details to them first and replace them in your form with a customer ID which you charge as you like.

* PayPal Express Checkout (but not any of their other checkout methods) uses the method you suggest. Although of course with them you leave the merchant's site to complete your payment. I suspect the reason it's not used more is that it requires the gateway to maintain some state that they wouldn't otherwise have to, and it involves an extra server round trip versus signing the submission.
I ran an RO server back in 2006, I had about 80k users, and 400 concurrently from a 4 month run before closing.

I'm not sure this is valid news...

Damn Porings.
Text and video of my OSCON 2011 Keynote presentation
I'd argue that the idea of a first-class "symbol" data type is one of Ruby's best features, and one that was directly copied from Lisp.
And all just because the metaphor lacks (here more than elsewhere). Using a tool also means becoming more proficient in it and this is similar to an investment. If you don't expect anything of significance to come out of the movement associated with your language it is hard for the working programmer to enjoy developing in it any more.
Here the fundamental difference to hammers becomes clear: Hammers don't evolve and have no complex ecosystem associated while programming languages do.
JRuby developer Charles Nutter claims that Java JDK7 gives a performance boost to JRuby, saying "On bench_threaded_reverse, Java 7 is 20% faster than Java 6, and JRuby plus invokedynamic is 20% faster than that".[1]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JRuby with the [1] being

https://twitter.com/#!/headius/status/78282122997149696
I don't think this is a valid analogy. The language/tools/support/ability-to-hire-developers are all a fluid ever-changing thing. Hammers aren't. Take this post.. people are excited about updates. I'm just saying the updates are kind of too little too late for me.
Help your friends in switching to Gmail from other email providers.
I paid $4.53/gallon for diesel in Boston yesterday, so I guess we're all good to go on the electrics. (I bought a diesel instead, which does get great mileage.)
Granted.

Under vi(1), the ctags example in the article is a constructive activity.

In the case of cscope, one needs to drive a development session from cscope then drop into vi to make edits.
As I recall from my own primary and secondary education, being a nerd who likes reading about science and math, and spends most of his time after school on his computer is not exactly encouraged by society either. Your parents want to cut down on your time spent in front of the computer, your dad wants you to go outside and play sports, the jocks at school give you shit, the girls pay no attention to you.

Girls interested in computers may be portrayed as losers and antisocial and outcasts, but guys interested in computers have been portrayed as and treated by society as antisocial outcast losers for as long as there has been such a thing as a computer geek.

Given that amount of social pressure and shaming and exclusion faced by young computer nerds, one wonders why anyone would go into tech. But more boys do and fewer girls do.
Why is programming a basic skill? To me, programming is more of a trade than a basic skill. People get by just fine without knowing a thing about programming. When students can't read, write, and do simple mathematics, then they have trouble later in life.

I believe logic and basic computing (this is a folder, that is a keyboard, etc.) are necessary. In fact, these form the foundation for programming later, but how could programming be considered a skill comparable to reading or writing?
Apple iPhone 4S Lite Edition Pictures And Information
I'm not sure that CakePHP is any more a market leader than Symfony.
> I don't understand why you think the Ruby code has better SNR.

Because they say the same thing, but the Python code is much longer, if you count tokens instead of lines. It has about 28-30 more tokens than the Ruby code does, about three per line. Those tokens don't convey any information. They're just redundancy, i.e. noise. And there are a lot of them; these redundant tokens are something like a third of the code.

Now, redundancy can be useful (see e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/redund.html) but it is costly, so you should keep it to the minimum that achieves what you want the redundancy to achieve.