skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I propose we don't talk about languages with "significant whitespace", but instead about "languages with proper indentation enforced".

Yes, 'significant whitespace' is too sweeping a term to be useful. I've heard people complain about Python's 'significant whitespace' until they realize that it uses basically the exact same whitespace rules as Java does, except with sensible indentation rules instead of braces.

http://www.secnetix.de/olli/Python/block_indentation.hawk
Almost everything good and bad that humans have done is due to the drive of a SMALL number of (or single) individuals (American Decl. of Independence, Soviet revolution, Indian freedom struggle, race to colonize the world, WW2, 9/11, Iraq invasion).

That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.

There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.
Most majors with the word Science in them, aren't (political, social, etc.). I am really not sure how that happened.
I flew with a 3-inch knife three times in the US and Europe last year without being noticed (accidentally packed when I was leaving home, wasn't checking a bag, so took my chances).

A friend flew with a large aerosol can and a full box of live 12-gauge shotgun shells the day after the liquid bomb scare (supposedly super high security that day), and only noticed later when he unpacked his carry-on.

In almost 100 flights over the last three years, I almost always carry liquid in excess of three ounces in my backpack without putting it in a separate bag (toothpaste, contact solution). It has only once been inspected.

I regularly carry on rock climbing gear, including a "nut tool" which is shaped like an 8-inch steel blade. It's not actually sharp, but there is no way to tell that in the scanner and I have yet to have it hand-inspected.
Article assumes that humans aren't reproducing, when in-fact, there are more humans today then yesterday, and will be more in the future than there are today.

To advance as a species, we don't need everyone in the species to advance, just a select few who take everyone with them as they discover new things.
Not that I'm a designer or know what I'm talking about, but a few years ago I switched from doing all of my graphics work in The Gimp to all scalable vector graphics in Inkscape, and couldn't be happier.

It's a different method altogether, and skills from one don't pass to the other, but once you get the SVG tricks down you can do a lot of tremendously complicated designs with little effort, and the master copy is a breeze to work with. Modifications and post-processing manipulations become cheap operations.

It's a little unstable outside of Linux, but does run on OS X and Windows. On OS X, it crashes pretty often but recovers cleanly.
Wouldn't that be difficult and time consuming to verify?
Why big companies can’t change
Yep, that's my understanding -- it's basically "we spent $xx,xxx training you, then you left. We think you owe us $yy,yyy."

That being said, it's a company of humans. What good is a developer who's shackled to their desk while a spouse is distressed in another state? None. There will be a way to work it out. We want you to be happy and great at building software, not imprisoned.
I wouldn't say there is a hard rule of thumb and there are three levels of operation possible, at least with primefaces:

1) All row data sent to client side, all paging done on client

2) Backing controller contains a List with all data in memory, client only gets 1 page at a time via ajax updates.

3) A truly 'Lazy' data model, ajax request for a new page of rows, controller references a lazy data model that fetches just that page worth of data from the database tier and sends it to the client.

In practice I really only use #2 and #3 normally. Unless the application has a bad internet connection as a requirement I assume its faster or negligible to fetch pages via ajax vs loading them all into the client up front. As far as choosing between #2 and #3, for my applications its usually obvious, the table either contains 5-25 items (go with 2) or thousands of items (go with 3).

In the middle ground i guess it comes down to loading: Can you afford to use more memory in the web tier or would you rather keep that memory usage down and suffer slightly long update times? Assuming your database is well designed it should only had maybe 10ms onto your response time to just grab the page from the database vs already having it in memory.
On the other hand, the past decade has taught us again and again how powerful crowdsourcing can be.
There are certainly truly epic people out there that are well known, but hell me and Jeremy have many more followers than the guy who wrote openssl along with people like Mike Pall who could out-code most of us any day, it's a weird thing, but you're average programmer isn't concerned about lower level things like that, so they simply don't care. There are of course exceptions to this, people like Carmack or Linus, but still, you see my point.
totally agree but at 1:100,000 there are 70,000 of those people alive today.
I didn't mean to be cruel.

Self-Doubt is most likely going to be the driving force for him to get through the fancy stuff on his own. However I want to be known learning to program != cs.

Being confident in your own knowledge can often stops you from learning more. I often doubt my own knowledge, I often feel worried if I meet someone else because they expose me for the fraud I am. This keeps up the knowledge hunger.

I was young hackery type when I was a kid(I wasn't particularly academic either), trying various programming languages(C, Scheme, Haskell), building games(Even 3d), exploiting software with buffer overflows, maybe some malicious hacking(I was curious) and generally exploring computing. This made me over confident in my ability. Then the academic community completely showed me up, they showed me how little I know in terms of theoretical cs. Destroyed my confidence. They don't even respect the skills I had, they're not academic skills. This made me doubt myself, and to catch up on the academic side of cs. This taught me the lesson of being overconfident. Actually changed my attitude to approaching other computer guys too from "I'm the best", to "this guy might know more than me".

This made me impulse buy copies of don knuths books =P. My math skills also received a serious boost when I realised that was needed too.
Bieber has. Kutcher could do with a spelling and grammar check and actors shouldn't use the words "bad actor" dammit!
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Ask HN: Open problems in ML/data prediction
I have been competing in data prediction contests (like those on kaggle.com), and I am interested in trying a prediction collaboration.

I'm hoping to recruit 10-20 people who would work together with the common purpose of putting together a single prediction system. What open questions would:

1) Apply machine learning/prediction techniques
2) Use publicly available data
3) Hold enough general appeal to facilitate recruiting other ml folks.

I'm hoping that, by removing the competitive aspect, participants will have more incentive to share ideas... and as a result it could be a more educational experience.
It may be useful for finding ideas to earn money, but I have seen no indications that crowd sourcing is at all useful for solving complex questions, designing complex machinery, or discovering any form of truth.
Does everyone here just work or have fun too? Enjoy
While censorship can slow the spread of "evil ideas", as with nuclear weapons, attempts like these miss the fundamental cause, and stops education on how to deal with a potential biological attack. The childish example analogy is Dark Arts in Harry Potter: "Professor, how can we defend against the dark arts if we don't know what they are?"

What bothers me is a tendency to segregate knowledge into "too dangerous for citizen consumption" and "certified innocuous". Segregations like these don't just keep people out of the know - they have the perverse effect of stunting growth on those within the special circle [1], as people in the know write off anyone without their clearance level as incompetent, or lacking sufficient knowledge to make an informed decision.

[1] http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-...
They are diamagnetic i believe (so is water' very weakly so. - google for levitating frogs for a laugh.)

Diamagnetic materials create an equal field to what they are exposed to... Causing repulsion. In the case of superconducting, the field generated is very strong and why we can levitate any old magnet over a superconductor.

Levitating a frog (mostly water right?) takes some incredibly strong fields..... Liquid cooled bitter magnets etc....

Side note - rare earth supermagets are toxic. When they shatter, you dont want to ingest any of the bits/dust
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So there is no redundant effort being donee at Apache? No wasted effort?
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AMD Radeon 7970 announced, and it's a monster
thanks! ill read about it, we wont use it heavily since is a small app, i know java but i dont like it at all
Hasbro Sues ASUS Over Use Of Transformer Prime Name
If you had to incorporate search today - would you use indextank or solr ?
JavaScript is Lisp in C's clothing.
http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

Also this:
http://gigaom.com/cloud/node-js-and-the-javascript-age/
> Note that UTF-8 is quickly becoming the new "raw text file". The encoding of each symbol is very well defined and supported by programs already. It is actually better to have that exact definition than an ASCII word that may or may not be supported by all editors (and if it's not, as you said some symbols look similar; which one is intended?).

Not at all. You see 'A' on your screen: is it uppercase Latin 'a' or is it uppercase Greek alpha? Good luck, these are two distinct Unicode characters (with different UTF-8 encoding, obviously), but most fonts will (rightly) represent them identically.

How is your keyboard going to handle that? Your tablet keyboard? How do you know which symbol to type in when editing code? It's completely unmaintainable and unreadable.

In the scheme I described, if the word 'alpha' is not supported by the editor, then it displays the string 'alpha'. That's of course not ambiguous. And a good editor, in my scheme, would not display 'Alpha' as 'A' if it's well thought of, it would just display 'Alpha', which is not ambiguous and clear.

If the source is UTF-8, on the other hand, should the editor display U+03B1 to avoid the visual ambiguity of 'A'? Can you remember what Greek (or otherwise) letter that is?

Finally, note that there are 12 Unicode characters for the Greek letter alpha... See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha#Computer_encoding

So it's completely misguided to accept arbitrary Unicode characters in identifiers. Because the only way to display such an identifier in an non-ambiguous way is to display the binary encoding...

So, arguably, one could use a set of characters larger than ASCII for programming. But the full Unicode range is not it, there is way too much crap in there.
Final year CS student in a British University here.

I can certainly see where the author's coming from, although I don't find the situation this dire. I'm not British so I don't know that much about how Universities worked and were perceived in society in the past and I guess I might have a slightly different mindset. Anyway, let me explain myself.

We have this modular course structure at my school. Yes, you can pick courses varying from "Developing web applications with Java" to hard CS stuff like compiler design and advanced algorithms. As far as I can tell, no course has been dropped because it was too hard - because students like challenges and take them. The same goes for final year projects, I've seen a student saying that she won't be doing any programming for her project (yeah, WTF), but I also know of more serious engineering projects (like a guy refreshing the electronics and more importantly, the software of a popular home-build 3D printer - and using the capabilities to do some stuff I'd really like to have on my 3d printer), or more experimental projects like mining Twitter for medical drug information (like perceived effectiveness, side-effects, usage patterns, etc).

What I'm trying to say is that there might be some easy paths you could take, but the students which always pick the easiest choice are usually the ones who end failing or dropping out. Sure, some of them graduate and I have mixed feelings about having the same degree as some of my fellow students. The author says that ' By pre-1990 standards about 20% of the students should have been failed.'. Well, in my school about 20% of the students are failed - each year.

Another topic is grade scaling. Yes, most lab and coursework grades are scaled in the first year and some in the second year. Exams are never scaled! But here's the thing, scaling is always down. It can be argued that labs are too easy if you need to scale the grades down and it is frustrating to do a perfect job and end up with a 70 something percent mark. But grades are never scaled up to 'turn a fail into a II'.

Finally, some people argue that a formal CS education is useless and out of touch with reality. I definitely don't agree. Knowing algorithms and data structures can give you an edge even for simple programs, knowing that some research areas and approaches even exist helps you avoid a lot of easy mistakes, labs will help you design better and faster because you sort of develop your own process and you get to know common pitfalls, reports and presentations train you to communicate better and using the proper domain language, having a clear image of how computers work from the grounds up is great when you're debugging.

TL;DR: Formal CS education still useful, just more chances to shoot yourself in the foot. (Yes, I consider getting a first without learning too much to be shooting yourself in the foot.) Study the fundamentals and the hard stuff and you should be better off than a self-taught person.
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http://r4icard-r4card.com/r4-cards.html - R4 card is very easy to use and also familiar with all the operating system where user can enjoy their movies, listen some songs, playing homebrew games and other multimedia files.
The inconsistency doesn't stop there; `for` variables are specialcased:

bar = ->
alert "Holy crap cheese is awesome!"

foo = ->
for bar of bars
console.log bar
return

↓

var bar, foo;

bar = function() {
return alert("Holy crap cheese is awesome!");
};

foo = function() {
var bar;
for (bar in bars) {
console.log(bar);
}
};
The author, Cringely, mentions that he helped write the business plan for Illustrator, Adobe Systems’ first consumer product. But you never get to see the business plans of super successful products -- that's what I'd like to see.

The one exception is "The Autodesk File" by Autodesk founder John Walker:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autoframe.html

It has the genuine documents from Autodesk's early years including business plans, finances, stock discussions, etc. I'm actually amazed that he did release it.
... and Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell, Smalltalk, etc
It's a fair guess that humanity will become extinct because of problems in the narcissistic sector. It comes down to Baudrillard's "classical analysis of Disneyland" and the fact that Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck are more emotionally satisfying than actual political commentators. Put the postmodern factors together and it gets hard to believe that humans will find political solutions to the problems of the 21st century.

As for why we haven't met aliens, I think there are two more fundamental causes.

(1) In 2011 we know that many stars have planets. This should be no big surprise based on considerations of angular momentum. The trouble is that Jupiter-sized planets tend to get sucked into the accretion disks of their stars, and in the process they tend to destroy Earth-sized planets that exist in the habitable zone. Planetary systems are common, but habitable terrestrial planets are rare.

(2) Interstellar travel and communication is highly difficult. It's possible that some civilization will manage an interstellar travel event among billions of civilizations and billions of years. However, the percolation threshold for a self-sustaining and growing interstellar civilization will never be reached. (Civilizations won't establish an outpost around a secondary star and create additional colonies)

A few years ago I did an analysis of interstellar war. The obvious mode of attack is to launch a deadly bombardment against a planet before any possible counterattack. One clear conclusion was that if you launched a missile that traveled at 10% of the speed of light, it wouldn't matter much if that missile were tipped with a hydrogen bomb or not -- you just can't get enough energy from either nuclear fusion or fission to propel a starship at a reasonable speed. (If you go slow, a 1000-year generation starship would need tons of antimatter simply to keep warm.) Note that interstellar hydrogen would impact such a starship at high velocities harder than radiation from a nuclear reactor.

The corollary is that neither fusion energy nor fission energy is sufficient for interstellar propulsion
This post on LessWrong explains why we think we're better than StickK: http://lesswrong.com/lw/7z1/antiakrasia_tool_like_stickkcom_...

Excerpt:

StickK is just about the contracts -- Beeminder links it to your data. That has some big advantages:

1. You don't have to know what you're committing to when you commit, which sounds completely (oxy)moronic but what we mean is that you're committing to keeping your datapoints on a "yellow brick road" which you have control over as you go. You commit to something general like "work out more" or "lose weight" and then decide as you go what that means based on your data.

2. You have the flexibility to change your contract in light of new information (like, 40 hours of actual focused work per week is damn hard!). ...
its stable?, ill install it on my mac for the development but later i will migrate it to a linux i guess
I disagree. While the language may seem inflammatory and silly, it is exactly correct - they are relying on tactics that have the express aim of getting this passed as fast as they can. That's ramming. You don't ignore large swaths of the American public, as well as all the companies and industry leaders, to not "ram" it through. You don't use legislative tricks to slowly pass something.

I agree with regard to "ramming socialism", but in this case, it's spot on.
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Anandtech: AMD Radeon HD 7970 Review (28nm, new architecture)
I'd not seen that article before. Thank you very much.

Highly recommend.
To be clear: this is a request to the journals, the journals haven't decided what to do with it yet.
I'd also add: power.

The recent history of the US government shows a frightening trend toward giving itself more power. And power to control information is always especially coveted.
The default search engine on the Kindle Fire is Google. More people using the Kindle Fire to search means more advertising revenue for Google.

In addition, the real threat to Google in the tablet/smartphone space is Apple. More people using Android, even a derivative, results in fewer people locked in to iOS.
There already is a fork that changes this (Coco), already mentioned in another comment: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3380423
Big corporations are in the inverse business of anonymity, they don't even want you to have a nickname (Google+?) and they want to get all the information they can from you (what you like, your address, etc). Plus, they have to respond to the US government/law.

So i don't think someone would trust anonymity to any of those big corporations.
As the populations keeps growing, we will keep moving away the lifestyle our minds and bodies are evolutionary suited for, causing more depression/discontent. So, we're going to have no choice but create stronger drugs, and ways to drown our discontent. That's why the entertainment industry will always be recession-free. Without iPhone games, movies, video games, etc, we'd all go crazy. We either need pointless distractions, or we need to fight to survive.
If alien species limited themselves to entertainment for such a long time, then where are the broadcasts from other solar systems?

On the other hand, recent studies apparently hint that things like electrical and gravitational constants may not be the same everywhere, so maybe they don't transmit their signals with light.

One more thing is that the argument that the age of the universe combined with its propensity to make life means there must be some intelligent life can also be applied to the probability that some intelligent life will wake up and save themselves from such a bad fate, as the author hints in the last paragraph. It doesn't mean all species get caught in that trap and never escape, it just means it's harder to become a species that saved itself from the perils of materialism, loss of social justice, and falsehood.
Also depends on the University full-stop. The CompSci part of my course was canned in favour of business subjects; I had the rug pulled out from under me after the first subject.

(So I got Z-specs, automata and big-O notation. Umm. Thanks guys.)
And those, i think, are just from the fixed magnets (which may be a type of superconducmting electromagnet thats just normally on.). During a scan, dont mangetic fields go way way up? The fixed ones are just there for stability and whatnot.
Facebook Wants You To Know How Their Social Advertising Works
I love that Amazon continues to explode our previous model of computing. The entire ecosystem of PaaS providers that are built on top of AWS benefit from these advances and Amazon wins by continuing to be the platform to build a PaaS on top of.

While I'm sure it's not their aim, the AWS console and associated web interfaces are functional but have pretty terrible user experience. It's as if AWS has found this perfect customer fit... build awesome tech, build an interface just-barely-good-enough to administer it... foster the ecosystem of providers that make your tech easier to use... rake in the cash because at the end of the day everyone is running on AWS regardless of who charges their card.
"Synchronous I/O Considered Harmful"
or
"I once considered teaching JavaScript as a first language, but then I found out it has no GOTO statements"
The most useful hypothesis: we are the first, and the galaxy is ours for taking. Now let's get back to work.