skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We dug through an 1 -1/4" gas main because their map had it 5' off from where it was. Luckily, the ditchwitch operator had the presence of mind to realize what the sand puffs were, turn off the machine, then run. Mapping accuracy matters.
Are the rioters buying these or the people and shop owners who want to protect their property?
Exactly. You are feeding false information into the system. Limiting the trading to epochs and holding orders levels the playing field.
> Some of my clients are surprised when I tell them that the development of Angry Birds cost $140k... because they physically cannot see where the money has gone... They can’t see the dead ends, the prototypes and the endless revisions that got Angry Birds to the point that it became brilliant.

This is not an Angry Bird specific problem. The exact same thing applies to any polished software that appears simple and intuitive. A good example is Things by Cultured Code and a permanent trickle of complaints in AppStore reviews that an app that simple must not be costing that much. People just fail to realize that simplicity does not come naturally, it's a fruit of a long, laborious and exhausting process.
Tiny bit of background is useful here:

The US has very lax employment regulation. You can be fired for any reason at any time.

Most of Europe, the Nordic countries in particular, have stringent regulation. Continuous employment can only be terminated for cause. In the last decade or so, it has become relatively common to try to circumvent this by hiring with back-to-back temporary contracts (usually 6-12 months) which are against the spirit – and often letter – of the law; they're only supposed to be used when there is a specific reason for being temporary. This poses all kinds of problems like vacations, maternity-/paternity leave and a general lack of life security.

Lately legislation has been discovered that allows “trial periods” to be abused: the trials are often of excessive length, 4-6 months, and people can be summarily dismissed without having to give notice (normally at least a month, often longer), vacation &c. This is obviously much more common in relatively low-skill jobs where the actual training doesn't take much of an investment.
We received the same letter last week. How many of you have responded? The first attorney we contacted wants to get in touch with them. Depending on the situation, that may or may not be the right thing to do.
You mean Dijkstra [1]? The guy who figured out shortest-path-first routing algorithm, semaphores, reverse polish notation?

The reason GOTO considered harmful (read the paper) was to assist in formally verifying the semantics of programs. Essentially, GOTO constructs fork environments in the formal analysis, and make things really difficult to work with.

They also make informal reasoning more difficult unless you apply restrictions on how you structure your program.

Know your history before you insult the people who came up with principles.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Edsger_W._Dij...
Just copying this from the docs, but you can pass an array of functions to mixin:

__::mixin(array(
'capitalize'=> function($string) { return ucwords($string); }
));
__::capitalize('moe'); // 'Moe'
One of the main developers here. Couple of points that aren't mentioned in the thread or aren't obvious w/o reading the whole thing:

* This is yet another example of how powerful macros are. All the features described are implemented in ~700 lines of code and a single macro.

* The pattern matching library is meant to be user extensible - you'll be able add your own patterns / syntax. Users simply need to bring their data types to whatever protocol is required by your new pattern. I think this going to be crazy powerful. For example - very fast pattern matching on primitive arrays / buffers.

* This is the groundwork for bringing high performance predicate dispatch to Clojure. This is under explored territory for dynamic languages.
Shatter patellas (what are patellas anyways?), skulls...this can't be a real review:

"Cuts looters off at the knees, 9 Aug 2011
This bat is perfectly weighted and will suit any UK shop-owner looking to protect their property.

Thanks to the ergonomic handle, one easy swing should be enough to shatter patellas, skulls or any other bone on your targeted looter. Personally, I would recommend also investing in some fingerless gloves for extra grip."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/ATYCJGIRKTZTS/...
Qt doesn't actually "use native widgets". However, it's capable of using native API's to draw native-looking widgets pixel-perfectly, which is more than enough on GNOME, KDE and Windows. In addition, it takes care of many cross-platform details such as button order and native dialogs, etc. On OS X I'd consider using native API's instead since I've heard so many complaints about Qt there.

SWT, however, does actually use native widgets. Try out an app that uses it - it will behave the way you would expect an app to behave.
A few years ago the city was running fiber for their internal network. They were directional boring under the street in the oldest part of town (circa 1880s mining town). They drilled right through a clay sewer pipe that was't on any maps and, since it was clay, didn't show up during the locate.

They ended up having to dig up the street anyway to fix it.
I will have to disagree with your assessment of Excel. It’s a great tool, especially for those who live in it, and it covers a large area of the triangle but the start is very rocky.

Using it for simple lists of numbers – maybe even with a bit of arithmetic – is indeed easy to pick up. I have, however, seen a lot of casual users of Excel struggle with getting their finished lists look a certain way and with printing them out. I think there is potential for optimization in that area. Still, apps that cover the whole triangle will probably always be somewhat intimidating for beginners.

I, for example, like InDesign (Adobe’s layout tool) a lot but it is completely inaccessible to beginners. You basically need to read up on it before you can even start putting the first word on a page, even if you are, say, versed in using word processing software. I think that’s perfectly alright, InDesign is an incredibly powerful tool that doesn’t need to be accessible to beginners.
Just as a reference point, in this article [http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-product...] the argument is made that you need four coders to make a game.

I think formula being followed for these articles lends them to being a little...exaggerated. (You NEED X to make a game)

I successfully shipped an XBLA game with one other programmer on my team. It took us 14 months, and we delivered on time, in scope, and on budget.

We had two designers writing scripts, so I _guess_ you could say we had four coders, but there was a vast gap in programming talent there. I had to go back through near ship and rewrite most of the scripts to fix all the bugs.

What you need, is to be smart about how you work (make tools to make making the game easier) and be realistic about what you can accomplish in your given budget/time frame.

I'm not saying gamedev is easy, it's hard, and it takes nearly as long to polish the game as it does to get it up and running. But there are so many target markets out there at this point that saying something like you need 100k/4 coders/100 hours of gameplay is foolish.
The top comment on a post about how to become a better programmer effectively amounts to "Don't try to be a better programmer, instead do X, Y, and Z because that will make more money"?

I remember you saying somewhere that you're into optimizing businesses and money is a great way to keep score, and in light of that, this comment even makes sense, but please keep in mind that for some people becoming a better programmer is not about maximizing ROI.
patella = kneecap
i like how you bash the source, then proceed to enlighten us with your "stack". dont worry, im all for your stack just as much the source... just chill with the bashiness
FACEBOOK allows spam apps then punished paying users
My opinion of Facebook has finally hit rock bottom. I have had my account for over 3 years and it is an important part of my social and business life.

I have spent of $10,000 on facebook advertising through that time and have NEVER done anything remotely spammy / blackhat with my account.

8 days ago whilst investigating different facebook app functionality (I'm writing an app at the moment and was looking at implementation ideas) I installed an app that competely took control of my account.

This app proceeded to create a immage folder on my account. Then added 4 facebook icon images to the folder and finally it tagged everyone of my friends in these photos.) It was obviously a spam app which I would have deleted immedietly had I been given the chance.

BUT within 2.5 minutes my entire account had been disabled. No warning, no anything just an email from facebook telling me my accoount was disabled.

I understand that they have security measures but surely they can see that this was not my app and it has completely hijacked my account.

So my nightmare began. I submitted an email to them via the link they provide requesting my account back.

6 days later they still did not respond so I emailed again. Now here we are 8 days into this nightmare and still no response from facebook.

This is totally and unterly out of order. facebook wants to attrract business users and advertisers.

How can they expect such people to trust them when at any moment they can lose their account.

I have lost all my facebook pages along with their FANS who I have paid to attract through Facebook Ads. this just should not be allowed.

The real issue as I see it is their appaling customer service. To take 8 days and still no response to a customer email is just not on.

In addition to losing access to my facebook pages I have also lost access to many other platforms that I used my facebook account to log into.

Another reason not to trust facebook in future.

facebook says we cannot have more than one account. So how are we supposed to protect ourselves from melicious apps when we dont have a dummy account that we can instal anything that might be dodgy.

I cant tell you how frustrated and angry I am and submit this as both a warning to other and also in the hope that someone at facebook might see it and do something about getting my facebook account back.
These are people fighting people. Any guns would be evenly distributed among the defenders and the attackers, and thus not serve to end or cool the conflict, but further exacerbate the situation.

This may be apples to oranges, but during the Los Angles riots that came about after the Rodney King verdict, while some rioters had guns they were way overwhelmed by the fire-power of people defending their property (mostly Koreans protecting their stores).

For whatever reasons some people view gun control they way others view drug control; that is, if something is available then oh-my-god everyone will have/use it. But it just doesn't play out like that.

For example, here in Arizona it is easy to get a gun. Many people have them, but I'd be surprised if they make up the majority, and we don't have routine daily gun fights here.

My anecdotal observations aren't going to explain any complex social dynamics, but some conjectures put forth in this discussion do not seem to be based in data or experience.

One thing that - to me, at least - has always been obvious is a direct proportional relation between guns and violence. Less guns, less violence; more guns more violence. Weapons are a catalyst for violence.

Switzerland.
Braid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braid_%28video_game%29) is a great example: "During the game's three years of development, Blow put about US$200,000 of his own money into its development, most going towards hiring of David Hellman for artwork and for living expenses."
Yes, it would make perfect sense for Amazon to cancel thousands of orders because they could be involved in some kind of ongoing riot. Great idea. /s
"Sending the wrong contents to the wrong person (s)"
I need technology to avoid sending drunken messages at 4am on saturday night saying "I'll do evertyhing ot gte U bcak!" to my boss ...
Surely rioters? I find it hard to believe a shop owner is seriously going to try and hold the line by themselves against a mob. Also, a baseball bat is a classic disguised weapon but a shopkeeper will have no justification in having one so it is probably an offensive weapon in UK law.

I've heard it said that D-cell Maglite torches are used by security guards not because they necessarily need a torch (a headtorch is generally more useful anyway), but because it can be carried and justified legally.
Coffeescript-inspired syntax is nice, but unfortunately Matlab is clearly superior for anything mathematical than most other languages, so drawing some inspiration from it wouldn't hurt...

For example:

m1 = matrix([1, 2, 5],
[2, -1, 6],
[5, 10, -1])

why not adapt a simpler syntax for constructing multi-dimensional arrays:

m1 = [1 2 5; # commas are optional
2, -1, 6;
5, 10, -1]

Also, a special constructor for matrices and vectors is redundant - in a mathematical language, a list/array is the special case, not a matrix/vector. Besides, vectors are just a special case of matrices, no need to treat them differently, especially since the dot product is not overloaded in Calculize.

Matlab also wins by having a special syntax for matrix transpose. Now, this depends on the implementation ( AFAIK, Matlab doesn't actually transpose the matrix, it simply uses a different algorithm for further calculations), but would still be nice, since it's often useful (necessary) when trying to multiply matrices.
On Quitting My Agency Job and Joining a Little Berlin Start-Up Called SoundCloud
Creating a Facebook-like URL submission tool with Embedly and Ext Core
> May I ask, why is implicit scoping bad? I think it is very good for a dynamically typed language, where variables do not need to be declared beforehand.

After extensive experience with it in Python and Ruby, I don't. It's just too prone to typos and broken scoping to be worth it.

> What other solution do you propose? Demanding all variables are declared?

yes.

> That's a very good idea, but it goes against the spirit of javascript and other dynamic languages.

No it does not.

* Javascript has explicit scoping, it's mandatory in strict mode (ES5) and extensions add even more flexible scoping methods (e.g. `let` in Mozilla's JS 1.7[0])

* Likewise with Perl under `use strict`

* Or even in VB and VBScript using Option Explicit

* Smalltalk mandates declaring local variables

* Scheme (and more generally lisps) make extensive use of `let`-type blocks

Dynamic typing and implicit scoping are entirely orthogonal, and I truly find no value whatsoever in implicit scoping: it's a hindrance in every situation, and it helps in none.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/New_in_javascript_1.7#Block...
Erm... I believe it's pretty popular in web-land, has been for some time, and remains so.

Though I have no personal evidence for any of that ;) - I have never used Ruby, I don't know anybody in real life that does, and in fact aside from three or four mentions-in-passing I have never heard anybody even talk about it. Different worlds, I guess.

EDIT: Why am I reading a Ruby article, then? That's easy... just avoiding a bit of work. Maybe I'd find that it had done something interesting.
The meaning of a transaction is generally understood. All I am saying is anything that would merit a journal entry gets feed through pipe instead of consolidated and reported months (or years!) later. I will do my own accounting, you can too.
Actually, the functional alternative in scala is this:

persons.filter(_.age >= 18).foreach(p => { (code here) });

That is way, way more readable, imho.
4000% increate in the sale of Coleman PefectFlow 1-Burner Stoves on Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/gp/movers-and-shakers/sporting-goods

It must be significant.
That doesn't make sense, by the time you get the bat the riots should be over. Are the local sporting good stores all sold out?
A brief look through Google + features.
I'm surprised at how so many people are taking the list itself literally. If you're lucky enough, you might have found something REALLY interesting to do, which kept you motivated enough to keep learning new things as required until you become a Master. But that doesn't mean the rest of Us don't deserve to be good.
What I'm trying to say is, if I wanted to be an awesome programmer just for the sake of it, it still counts. I don't have to have a Grand Idea I hope to achieve by becoming good at it. Once you start getting good at any non-trivial task through hard work, you begin to appreciate the acquired skill and feel good about it. This feedback is enough to keep you going.

I think you get better at getting better as you keep getting better. So as you gain experience, you can figure out what will interest you better and change your direction, rather than having a set path right from the start.
I don't know, but I'm sure it has. If your primary interface to MySQL is a GUI tool where you just click the "create table" button, type in a name and accept the other defaults, you could be using MyISAM tables without knowing anything about table types.

Don't forget, that 10 years of experience could just be 1 year repeated 10 times. A cardinal number of years doesn't always equate to increasing breadth of knowledge.
I find it hard to believe a shop owner is seriously going to try and hold the line by themselves against a mob

Groups of shop owners are defending themselves. See this video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011/aug/09/london-riots-...
Might become a Business Ethics Class classic. From my point of view, Amazon should not deliver. It is obvious the bats are intended to be used as weapons, which is illegal at least in Germany, no matter what circumstances.
This isn't thousands, it's only a few hundred. Remember, the British don't play much baseball so they would normally only be selling a handful of any given bat per day.
MIT Media Lab's Place Pulse: Creating a Collaborative Image of the City
I'm totally OK with that. FWIW, my comment is about being a better engineer: I simply don't think that programming skill uniquely makes one a better engineer when divorced from user needs or commercial considerations.
Well people in England are burning cars. Also they're poor. Surely they must have US-based backers ?
It would be handy if the spreadsheet came with the IP addresses.
What Are Websites Made Of? [Infographic]
Yep, just "preponderance of evidence" [1]. Seems like this could fit.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_burden_of_proof#Preponder...
Philosophy behind undefined behavior
(UK poster here - living away from the riots though, thankfully)

There was apparently a decently large group of Turkish business owners in London last night who got together with baseball bats to protect their businesses (which apparently worked).

I'd say it's a bit of both.
The set of targeted works is pretty small, from what I hear. My understanding is that as long as you stay away from gay porn and recently released movies, your risk of litigation is negligible.
I'm willing to believe you, but I didn't make that up, I was just cribbing from the link: To reduce the time required to access JavaScript properties, V8 does not use dynamic lookup to access properties. Instead, V8 dynamically creates hidden classes behind the scenes.

I gather a "hidden class" is not an idiom of C++ as I'd assumed, rather something V8 people made up, but that's what they call it.
This is the basic premise behind a site I made a few months ago. a checklist wiki where you can find a checklist that will probably include things you hadn't thought of. It is up at todowiki.com. There are very few things there right now, and wiki-spam is rampant, but I'm trying.
This would apply to Pyjamas (Python that compiles to JS) too.

That said, Coffeescript is very similar to Python.
Over 40,000 Does Dismissed In Copyright Troll Cases
No, you picked an outlier. OP pointed out a trend -- 8/10 of the top "Movers and Shakers" are bats/batons. That is significant.
His cases use only one dimension (depth).
We solve this issue (for the most part) at my company using email templates for common questions... It works quite well too!
A Photon's Point of View
Patent Troll Lawyers Made To Pay Sanctions
I actually have an inner debate with myself about it each time I write it. I know there are people like you (and apparently the article author) that will automatically downvote something because it says not to.

But I also know when to disarm someone's reflexive voting and get my voice heard.

The vast majority of my comments (even quite a few unfavorable ones) don't get that statement at the beginning. Most of the time, it really is a negative.

As with all speech, it's all about knowing when and how to use it. There are very few statements that should -never- be used.
27,000% percent increase in flashlights in Japan. Clearly the rioters threaten our power plants.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/movers-and-shakers/378-9075017-80...
Google Algorithm Change History
Perhaps because you do both, ya? I bet if you only programmed you could be John Carmack good at programming and John Carmack good at running.
Startup Monthly Ice Breaker and Idea Accelerator 
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We will help you hack your startup with business model that works using Lean Startup methodology.

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Startup Monthly Team
Ask HN: How to stay in touch with the State-of-the-Art?
Hi guys!
As an entrepreneur we need to always be aware of new technologies. Is there any site that summarizes State-of-the-Art in technology? e.g Researches, new technologies, etc.
Hacker tries to blackmail RIM over riot data
It boggles the imagination to see one person leading three companies, each of which has to solve enormous problems that no one else has been able to overcome in the past several decades. I find it quite inspirational to see Elon doing this.
Ask HN: Automatically sync Google Docs & Dropbox
Hi all,

I'm working on a website to automatically sync my google/docs documents with my dropbox account.

Would anyone else be interested in this as an online service?

Thanks
You have to be really careful with such taxes. Take for instance India: the Indian government places a tax on the exercise of any option. This doesn't stop HFT at all - it simply makes it more favorable to trade out of a position before exercise. My guess is it mostly hurts the business owner/investor trying to hedge risk.

Likewise, a fee on a stock trade would probably have little effect on banks like GS, etc. I imagine it would instead discourage trading through public exchanges and widen spreads - all things that are bad for the little guy.
I see where you're coming from with that, although personally I mostly think of them as different approaches of considering the same thing. A Turing machine asks the question of what a computer can be, while lambda calculus asks the question of what a computer program can be. You could also think of the TM as an abstraction of the imperative paradigm, and LC as as abstraction of the functional paradigm. We know they're theoretically equivalent, but they're different ways of conceptualizing it, and probably trying to figure out which is more basic is not a good use of our time :P
Thanks. I do not have specific questions at this time, it just seemed too good to be true.

If I was building a web application then I would avoid MSFT but using MSFT hardware is much easier than developing my own or hacking stuff to work with MSFT hardware.
Oh! I did not know that.