skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If coding without goto statements makes code flow easier to understand, consider taking the next step and coding without if() statements!

Many conditional statements and sentinel null values can be replaced with strategy objects or mock objects, revealing a more functional programming style that can make testing easier.

http://programmingwithoutifs.blogspot.com/
If everyone was using it for transactions there would be a much, much higher demand and you wouldn't need 40 planes worth for a similar amount of buying power.

Ultimately, energy should be currency, not gold, but it is still better than fiat.
"Catch them young"

Canada was a highly developed economy before the era of big oil. It has the third largest proven oil reserves after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Despite high production, primary industries constitute less than 6.2% of GDP. Contrast this with embryonic economies that were just emerging from colonial control, where a few million dollars was disproportionately above average income and you could buy yourself a government by creating a ruling oligarchy.

"We only negotiate with terrorists when they're selling oil."

The capitalist deception is that money bought weapons for the ruling class to do the dirty work of taking these resources by force when necessary. Doing big business with a thug empowers him; when he's several orders of magnitude wealthier than everyone in his community, you get a polarized society of highly successful armed gangs and oppressed people. When he's also a religious extremist you get the Taliban. Can a free market exist without a free society?
TLS-SRP: The smarter way to do password authentication.
seems like there's nothing America can do to defend itself

Well that's ridiculous. Just install McAfee. Disconnect yourself from the network. ;-)
Seriously, computer security is a big business. Money is being made. Something is being secured out there.

Edit: Please read the other comments and calm yourself down.
really, cause i didn't notice a thing
Profit is an almost perfect indicator of barriers to entry. If a company makes a lot of profit (35+% operating margin) doing something - Apple's HW, or Microsoft's OS - many observers inevitably think they can just come in with a lower margin version, thinking "hey, some margin on huge volumes is still great!" But they miss the point that large margins follow from barriers to entry. Large margins on revenues the size of Apples indicate huge barriers to entry.
"little, if anything" is the English idiom.
Felt it distinctly in Friendship Heights (Wisconsin Ave,, just across Western Ave. from DC)
Seems like if you were moving in some way, or perhaps standing, you're less likely to realize there was a quake. Reminds me of the monkey business illusion. We're really good at ignoring information our senses feed to us.
Not a geologist but I'm married to one. That makes me an expert geologist at parties right?

Anyways, Indonesia would be totally unrelated, it's part of the Ring of Fire, geological activity there is expected and their big one happened on Sunday. Stuff today is just aftershocks.

Colorado and Virginia might be correlated since it's uncommon (but not unexpected) for stuff east of the Rockies to rattle about but I'd lean towards it just being a coincidence since they're 12 hours (05:46:19 UTC and 17:51:03 UTC) and ~2650 km apart.
Couldn't send or receive calls for 20 min, had a client leaving me voice mails on google voice ;/
Given Google's excellent track record on direct contact customer support, I trust this will be an great step forward for the entire community!
I knew Mike Arrington was a dummy...didn’t think he was this big a dummy

I usually discount any argument that begins with name calling
It is impossible to meet Matija and not be impressed by his passion about his work. He captivated the entire audience in Seedcamp Ljubljana and was the favorite of pretty much everyone. I was personally very surprised that Farmeron did not get an investment at that time. As it turns out, Seedcamp had bigger plans for Farmeron. It got invited to Seedcamp London, similarly rocked the stage. Farmeron is now part of the Seedcamp family and very very deservedly so.
Did not feel it in Princeton, NJ.
Top 5 Cydia Apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch
Not to spoil the fun, but isn't this the sort of stuff that leads down the slippery slope to reddit's front page? I understand that this affects large numbers of HN users, but so do lots of things that are very far from the tech/business/coding core of this site. Besides, there are a million places to go for this info.
My goodness, was that a terrible omission on my part.
Friends in both Grand Rapids and Holland also felt it.
Hi, what book would you recommend in alternative to e Applied Cryptography?
>I'm happy I don't have to experience this often, like in California.

Erm... We don't experience this often in California... I definitely felt the '89 quake, probably felt one in the 90s and I think I felt a quake a few years ago. So I've felt them once per decade.

Further, CA has built relatively well to account for earthquakes and doesn't have a giant off-shore shelf waiting to collapse and drown us under a tsunami[1], so we have that going for us, which is nice.

[1] http://modernsurvivalblog.com/earthquakes/earthquake-east-co...
According to that, nearly all of Oracle's arguments boil down to "the Java API is a beautiful and unique snowflake, therefor it should be copyrightable". It may very well be beautiful and unique, but are they really suggesting that Google cloned Java merely because they didn't want to take the time to come up with their own API and not because they wanted to interoperate with existing Java code and tools? Oracle points out that Google's Java is not 100% compatible, but so what? It's still compatible with a large subset of Java, and a large subset of tools and libraries do, in fact, work with Android unmodified.

Is there not some aspect of copyright law that prevents these sorts of doomsday abuse scenarios e.g. someone copyrights the sound of breathing and we all choke to death? It seems to me that the extreme collatoral damage that would be caused by copyrightable APIs is, in itself, a silver bullet argument against it.
Few buildings evacuated in Harrisburg, PA
I have a port of Chromium (version 5) on my phone. I don't use it, except for the odd bit of testing, as dragging over the page selects text rather than scrolling. That said, Chrome's V8 runs JavaScript much faster than my phone's native Gecko browser.

As for Chromium vs the Android browser, it looks like Chromium has way more features than even Honeycomb's browser [1]. Though many, such as contenteditable, WAI-ARIA, File APIs and Notifications will be difficult to implement on a 3.5" device.

[1] http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=chrome+14&b2=androi...
OT: To anyone from Facebook (particularly authentication/security)

I've recently (last few days) encountered a problem with your email (as user ID) authentication process. You're associating email addresses that have not been authenticated and that appear to be mis-intepretations of the email address actually submitted for authentication.

Take a look at my HN profile here, and decide whether I have sufficient credence to warrant a follow up via email (also in my profile; note the instructions for bypassing spam filtering).

I tried reporting this via your public interfaces, but that's like, well, choose your own simile. (I.e., zero response.)
I'm not arguing that it isn't spelled wrong or incorrectly, just that it isn't of French origin. It wouldn't be the first time an English speaker misspelled a foreign origin word. Naive comes to mind as a classic example. Maybe nee as well.
I really like this strategy. Its so easy to let those deadlines you set for yourself just slip by.
Looks like Google+ is getting to them. I wonder if these changes were in the pipeline before G+ or only put into motion after?
I was right near the center of it. Was pretty scary. The building I'm in was shaking. Definitely made my day a bit more interesting.
Economic inequality is linked to biased self-perception
HAARP
Coyote Logistics’s Software Moves Trucks of Heineken for Less
I know!

He could probably better optimize his tasks by typing C-x C-c, then going out & buying a small notepad & pen ;)

(I kid! I kid! Cool project really)

[edit] downvoted! I'll C-c r & remind myself not to make cheap emacs jokes in future.
Some (all?) people in the North Hills didn't feel it. Our building out East shook for a second or two though.
Felt it and seen it in Toronto, on the 23th floor. My chandelier was swinging moderately.
I've lived in the Bay Area for ~24 years and I've actually felt maybe 4. I'd hardly call that often.
Practical Cryptography (also known as Cryptography Engineering).

But read them to learn how to break cryptosystems, and then go do that. Don't read them and then try to build something. They're missing details too.
I'm just being diplomatic, my friend. There's no reason for pointless confrontation on some internet forum. Though I appreciate the support, dawg.
One additional use, which I ran into a few years ago, is to make it explicit when you're falling through in a case statement.
Zipcar Profiled: Bloomberg Enterprise - Video
Sometimes I wonder what other people do with their phones to need these kinds of apps.

Personally I use my phone quite extensively to search for routes (google maps), to check my mail, to chat, take photos, play a few games, glance at the sync'ed calendar, listen to music, browse HN and... to make phone-calls.

Not a single time have I felt a need to search something from my "social graph", or my dropbox, or my calendar, or my facebook, or anything like that...
Well, let's suppose you're in Trenton, NJ (since you didn't specify). The distance between Trenton and Toronto is 546 km. If it took 10 seconds to travel there, then it was traveling at 54.6 km/s, or 196560 km/hour. For comparison, the speed of sound is 340.29 m/s, or 0.34029 km/s; that means that the shockwave travelled at Mach 160.

Of course, this assumes that it was traveling over the surface, so it's really lower than this, but I'm unsure of how much. From what I'm seeing, the fastest earthquakes generally travel about 13 km/s, so this may be way high.
The "_why" post led me over to TryRuby.org which looks like it may have been inspiration. The thing I noticed was how much I prferred TryRuby's layout. It seems like the CodeAcademy instructions are overwhelmed by other screen elements and awkwardly placed lower left of the console.

I also think you could let people type more a la Learn * The Hard Way.

But really like where you're going.
About 10 years ago during a minor earthquake in the California Bay Area, I happened to be on the phone with my girlfriend at the time who was in Mountain View, I was in San Jose. The conversation went something like:

GF: "Oh! There's an earthquake!"

Me: "What, no there isn-- Oh wow, there's an earthquake!"

(few seconds of shaking)

GF: "Okay, it's over"

Me: "No it isn't, I stil feel-- Oh yeah, it's over!"

I'd estimate the delay to have been ~2-3 seconds over ~20 miles -- but I don't remember where the epicenter was, or how deep the quake was.
About 3.5 km/s - if poorly drawn comics are to be believed.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/seismic_waves.png
I don't want to get into the "right-wing" side of things, as that's overly political. Let's focus on the assertions of the documentary instead.

One of them suggested that tenure is very easy to get. In the article you posted, "tenure" appears exactly twice, neither time doing anything to dispel that notion. Furthermore, the byzantine and kafkaesque "due process" to eliminate bad teachers has been in the news quite a bit the last few years; I had heard of the NYC Rubber Room long before I saw Waiting For Superman.

Perhaps instead of downvoting my comment and appealing to a political agenda -- I have none, and ironically, most of my family are teachers -- it would be more instructive to discuss the actual issues at hand.
Latest news is both at-risk reactors automatically shut down and crews are doing walk throughs.

http://www.wavy.com/dpp/news/local_news/august-23-earthquake
I'd like to see an example. Are you familiar with Duff's Device btw?
I also reported to the USGS. I'm on the 14th floor of a building in Kendall Sq (Cambridge) and we shook for probably 45 seconds.
Felt in in Ottawa, too.
Touché! I was high-and-mighty too cool for school Designer role-playing.
People, not industry, power innovation in Chile
as usual, opera was first to implement that, a looong time ago. it also has auto fit width/height options, so i think it deserves a try as well.
Before anybody gets too excited, know that this case doesn't actually open the door to invalidating software patents in general. It clarifies things a little bit is all.
> "That's what I mean by "effective security"."

That stuff doesn't cost all that much more. It's non-trivial, sure. But it's not going to make a huge impact on the bottom line. A demand for it would end up costing enterprise software suppliers quite a bit in one-time costs to clean up their code-bases and standard install practices.

> "I do not believe defense contractors, energy concerns, industrial suppliers, etc, should even acknowledge such breaches simply because of national security."

Perhaps not to the general public, but certainly they should be required to disclose to their clients.
DevOps: What It Is, Why It Exists and Why It's Indispensable | Puppet Labs
You pay yourself whatever you feel is best for you, the business, and your investors. Naturally, there are some disagreements between those parties about what that means. You just have to work it out. In my experience, this usually means founders make jack squat or nothing, whichever is less.
Yale University FTP file w/ 43,000 SSN and names gets indexed by Google
While I'm not sure they should always be public, I think blogs are a good way to force yourself to write. I recently started one because I want to (a) become a better writer and (b) to have a place to put personal reflections and pieces of interest. While each individual blog post might not be read-worthy, the added experience will likely help in your future documentation practices.
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/qu...
Yea, OpenSSL can be used as part of a stack. tptacek is objecting to developers using OpenSSL directly.
I can't wait for Finns to pop in here to tell us about the dark sides of this success. There must be some. For one, there's a tax rate that would make most Americans, and even most Europeans, choke on their latte.

I'm not sure that's bad, but this article seems to neglect to mention that nothing comes for free. This isn't just "doing it smarter", it's also investing a massive chunk of money.

Additionally, I honestly doubt it's sustainable. The example of the Kosovar kid with a language delay is telling: this will only work if there's only a few such kids in the school at once. With immigration to Finland strongly increasing over the past 5 years, the problem may at some point be more difficult to tackle the "traditional way" when, at least in certain cities and suburbs, half the classroom has trouble with the language. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.
Reddit buys the site that's been running their semiannual Secret Santa exchange
Has someone got one of those tools that goes in and puts everything to 'most paranoid' and then I can set things down as needed? I'm starting to feel that all the opt-out non-privacy on FB is overwhelming.

If it were opt-in, I could breath a sigh of relief that things are still at least as private as I last set them.
You're right. There isn't a shortage of mediocre content on the web. I use this method to improve my writing. Consistency is everything. Also if I have ideas to share (like this post) that may help people, I think that is worthwhile.
Blog for your startup?
Hi All,

Just wondering if everyone writes their own blogs for their startup(s) or have you outsourced that to someone? Please share experiences.

Thanks,
Interesting point. My co-workers were first to notice the earthquake as they had desks facing the window allowing them to see wires attached to an awning shaking. Meanwhile, I faced away from the windows and, because I'm a habitual leg-shaker, didn't feel anything.
Virality
An update pushed out yesterday was prepared entirely before HP made their big announcement, though. Will there be any WebOS updates for the TouchPad now that HP has discontinued it and is exiting that space entirely? Seems highly doubtful.
Speaking from experience, yes, yes it is.
That's the correct way to use an accent
I've tried but given up finding even a cached version of the original source material. Has anyone else had any luck?
Huh? I just looked, and I dont see any updates since I bought it three days ago.
Sure: http://imgur.com/7g97Zl&EE0eb&syLgd

The first and third are the same spot, but a slightly different angle and distance. The wall has three framed photos, and when the shaking stopped, I knew something was wrong there right away there since they were at crazy angles.
I felt it in Princeton, NJ.. For about 10 seconds.
The Fed Pays Banks Not To Lend
Twitter’s Biz Stone to Serve as Haas Executive Fellow | Berkeley-Haas
A creative application for Google Doodler
Very good idea. At least each edit made to a story will have to be voted upon.
Inca rulers and the upper class used gold for decoration and to make things like tableware from - the point of this discussion is whether it was used as currency, which it wasn't. How are you going to call something a currency when it's only hanging on the wall of the upper 2% of society? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but you said that gold was used by all societies of the last 1000's of years as a currency, but it flat out isn't. Most societies, yes, but not all - and that's important, because it shows that in places where there is a relative abundance of gold, it's not good as a currency (the non-use of gold in Inca times was not solely because of high supply, I'm not interested in arguing details on Inca culture and economics here because frankly I don't know much more about it than what a couple of tour guides told me).

Anyway, let's go back to 2007. A house in Phoenix that sold for 250k in 2004 just reached one million. Which would you have rather bought back in 2004? That house, or a gold eagle?

My point - it's easy to make a 'case' with perfect hindsight. There are several drivers to the current high price of gold; people diversifying their portfolios into precious metals, Chinese millionaire who have limited options for storing value, increasing demand from emerging markets for jewelry. That's not the point; the point is that you are claiming that gold has 'intrinsic' value ('Gold is real money that holds it's value over time.'). That's bullshit, plain and simple. Yes, gold has historically been a relatively constant value store, but there is nothing intrinsically valuable about it, and (the vast majority of) those claiming it is are alarmist nutcases with little grasp of economics.
I'm not sure that's bad, but this article seems to neglect to mention that nothing comes for free. This isn't just "doing it smarter", it's also investing a massive chunk of money.

Doesn't the article say: "Yet Finland spends about 30 percent less per student than the United States"?

And Finland's per-capita GDP is practically the same as that of the US.
Yeah but I didn't quite get if his application servers were on EC2 or not. The usual comparison is Nginx+EC2 vs. S3 vs. CloudFront. (Now the page is down so I can't check again..)
side note: losvedir, if you actually are interested in Cambridge Coffee Shops for startups, check out http://hcombine.com/22/hcombine-start-up-coffee-shops/
In Northern California, a 5.8 leads to one or two "Did you feel that?" conversations and then everyone gets back to work.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-02-05/bay-area/17847632_1_ma...
That would be fine if someone posted an article about those things, or even a "Did anyone's server crash due to the earthquake?" But the thread is 95% "I felt it in XX"

edit: Thing I was responding to got deleted, but I'll leave this here anyway.
Agreed. On HN, does the number of votes for a story affect how hard it is to flag it off the front page?
I didn't know Developerworks still existed. After this article, I wish it didn't.
From the article it sounds like the Finns spend less and actually are "just doing it smarter."
I would look at the curriculum of most computer science programs.. you'll see subjects like discrete mathematics, computational theory, statistics, etc.

I would say however, if you want to specialize more in Python/Django you might want to look into a software engineering track as computer science tends to be much more theoretical in nature.
Advertising in Mobile Games is Broken
This is great news! I may not like them, but I'm glad they decided to surface the "send to groups" feature for all my friends who are on Facebook.
crickets Keeping hitting that arrow!
IMHO it's largely a side effect of first class functions. In Java in order to pass a function you need to pass an object that has the function, or an interface with the function, so it leads to a lot of line noise and thus people don't do it much. DI doesn't look impressive in a functional language because it's so well supported, but if you look at something like a global accumulator in a functional language you'll need a monad because you need state.

eg in Java it's easier to write:

int accum = 0;
for(int i : collection){
accum +=i;
}

rather than

collection.reduce(new IReduce<int> {
int reduce(int accum, int i){
return i + accum;
}
})

I'm a bit rusty on Java so the syntax may be off but you get the idea, where as in a functional language (F#) that code is reduced to:

collection
|> Seq.reduce +

Or in an imperative language that supports function passing (C#)

collection.sum((a,b) => a+b)
They write in the article it's not about the money - they spend third less than the USA. Taxes have nothing to do with how children are being taught.
Yes, I'm sorry if it wasn't clear that was what I was saying. Thanks for the examples. I also use t a lot, but more with c, e.g. ct. or ct).
Exactly, ligatures don't have any grammatical meaning. They're merely that - 'typographic'.
I was out walking and the first thing I noticed here in VA was the house next to me making shake-apart kinds of noises. I was next to a steel railing and the quake must have found its sympathetic frequency because that thing was vibrating like nobody's business. A lot of folks quickly emerging from their homes. An indicator of high unemployment, it seems to me.
Thanks for all the kind comments, it did take a fair amount of iterative work to get it to this point.
SeatGeek Blog: What An Earthquake Does To Page Load Time
Can patents be invalidated like this? I'm surprised this is the case. Makes the whole thing that much more absurd.
I was watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation last night, and was surprised to see one of the characters carrying around a tablet computer.

I can believe that finding visually-pleasing ratios of screen/margin, height/depth is a challenge, but the basic outline does not seem to be hard to imagine.
13 Things about Dubai people don't know.
List of things that people often do not know about Dubai from the many conversations I had with people in Canada/Germany/Netherlands/Malaysia.
I have a few more to add but I want to see if people like reading these sort of things first.. so let me know if you learned anything from the article.
Downtown Columbus, 21st floor, felt like a good 3 inches forward and back in north/south direction for a good 6 seconds.
Blocked as "spam/suspicious".
Could an earthquake hit NYC? History Says Yes
Looks great, but I just don't trust small companies -- especially those set up by teenagers -- with that level of data. I know too well how too many people behave when they got access to the mail spools back in the day, this is that on a much grander scale.

There's something reassuring about being one user drop in an ocean of millions, as I am in GMail.