skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It could indeed be that my jruby endeavors just happened at unfortunate times. The jruby-openssl bug that I'm currently seeing is a different one from last time - and it's apparently fixed in git-HEAD already, just not in the gems yet.

So I'm looking forward to the 0.7.5-release and with a bit of luck I might finally be able to jump on the jruby-bandwagon then.
I don't have an iOS device to play on it but this looks great! I think this will attract Angry Birds lovers and haters alike. I imagine you'll have competitors if this takes off, so it's good that you built a real game and not a simple novelty app.
I cannot shake my perception that this video was, in fact, created and narrated by Zack Galifianakis.

"Just weird stuff. Eddy currents."
whether or not they have patents, they do have spectrum, which is valuable by itself from my understanding.
"For an example of what happens when you break compatibility in the name of "progress" see Python3, which years on is still not installed by default anywhere, and probably never will be."

Python 3 is the default on some Linux distros (e.g. Arch Linux)...
Thanks... I actually know that, but I guess I had a brain fart. That and I was distracted playing the game.
Counterexample: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_v._Reimerdes
Hey neat, my app https://GetCloak.com/ made it into the list. And we're still beta -- though v1.0 is coming quite soon.

Fun!
Has Twitter Been Censoring Posts about a Saudi or American Spring?
Leaked Solaris 11 kernel source
That's more complicated due to the history of programming and sysadmin being more closely intertwined, as you discovered. The first 20 years of Unix were the "systems programmer" domain, having followed the "sales engineer" era of the 60s (speaking roughly here) after the burgeoning computer industry's customer relations functions started getting specialized and split off from nerds. There were many, many more of you 30 years ago.
Which was probably quickly resolved though, since that makes no sense, and would put you at odds with a significantly-greater population (like, 100x or more) which has viewed 'kiwi' as the fruit for a decade or two, and 'kiwifruit' for a couple decades more.

Put in context of myself, if I saw a site called "TimeWisconsinite" that allowed you to create "Wisconsinites", my first thought wouldn't be to assume you can create people or register for voting rights in Wisconsin, and even if it was, I wouldn't assume that for more than an instant. And if, say, Chinese turns out to have a word that sounds the same (maybe adopted because they imported our cheese and were so wowed by it that it spread through their culture), I'd find it humorous and borderline flattering that Wisconsin had reached such wide influence (billions!).
great product!
An important proviso is that this should only be done if you've got visibility & receive credit for the improvement. If not then management just sees another obsolete post ready for cost cutting.
Someone with a bit of education and an expanded vocabulary.
I use solarized in textmate and my terminal, I have been very happy with it.
Think about C++: not only legacy C++ was broken by each standard, it was also broken by each compiler releases. The change of compiler release was always a journey.<br>
It is normal that introduction of a new keyword breaks legacy C. A new standard is compatible with legacy code if the only adaptation required is to rename identifiers that collides with new keywords. There is no excuse for producing such a crap.
At the Franklin Institute Science Museum years ago, they had a huge (2 foot diameter? More?) copper disk attached to a crank suspended in the gap of a big-ass electromagnet. The idea was you spun the crank, and then operated a foot pedal that applied current to the electromagnet, which braked the wheel with eddy currents.

The disk had slotted sectors, so you could tell that the braking effect was less when those sectors were in the gap.

I don't know if the exhibit survived the themparkification of fi.edu... I hope so but somehow I doubt it.
Which reply? I'm not seeing a viable monetization method here...
This is amazing to me as I've never seen or heard of it before.

Question: If this same thing were to be done in a circular copper pipe that feeds into itself (ie a hoola hoop made of copper), and that hoop were rotated at the correct speed, would the magnet in effect never actually move and just hover in mid air?
SteerMouse + Logitech mouse of your choice.
That's not true. A slit will cause it to fall faster, but not as fast as with a non conductive pipe. I did this experiment a couple of years ago to answer that question. Unfortunately I can't find the exact timing data. If you do the thinking and figure out how the currents should flow due to the moving magnet, this makes sense.
On Mac, up/down goes to the beginning and end of the line but cmd-up/down switches engines. Thanks for the hint!
I have to say, as much as bitcoin is in a downfall, this actually makes a ton of sense. That was the initial goal of bitcoin, to create a de-centralized currency. As long as the BTC is a STABLE currency this works out well. Or short-term stable. It can become a medium of financial transfer: I buy 10 BTC, donate it, they claim 10 BTC, convert to cash. Done.

It would be great if there was a tool to literally facilitate this transaction without directly giving from one company to another, thus bypassing SOPA. I give the "holder" $10, the "holder" gives me 10 BTC. Then I give 10 BTC to say PirateBay. Then the "holder" guarantees that piratebay can sell 10 BTC to them for $10. Thats it. They only converted BTC to/from cash. I directly gave BTC to pirate bay. SOPA is ignored.

HOWEVER THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE INTERNET IS AGAINST. This will prevent all sort of anti-fraud that is going on now. You will wind up bypassing years of innovation to create a black market. It will be detremental.
Superconductors have some special-case behavior with regard to magnetic fields:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdiamagnetism
You really think people are going to change their browser just because their favorite search engine is not the default? It takes exactly two "clicks" of the mouse to change the default search engine in Firefox.

Mozilla would switch away from Google in a heartbeat if the money was right.
Amendments 1–10 and 27 were products of the same Philadelphia Convention that produced the US Constitution, and were proposed along with it.

You could try Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights#Ph...
I don't think startups want a desingineer, but rather an expert at one skill (product UI/UX, engineering, marketing) with a pretty decent understanding of a secondary skill area.

For example, I do a fair amount of design work in photoshop etc. I can implement simple front-end stuff. But my co-founder can get complex front-end engineering stuff done 5-10x faster if I just help him pair program it. If I didn't understand code, we'd be unable to do that. Something similar probably to be said about his sense of design since he often ends up giving me really good feedback in the middle of building the page out.
I have a bunch of strong magnets from old hard drives and I am thinking hard how this could finally be a good use of them. But the tube is opaque, so I can't see how I can make a toy out of it.

I guess I have to buy a copper tube to find out.
We have, and we're working to make it better. For something like this you could use any engine you want as long as it generates wav or mp3 files.
I haven't had time to read through the whole article (and I already know how type classes work :)) so I just have one little point to add.

As correctly put in the article, type classes can provide default implementations. However, one cute thing that was missed is that type classes can provide default implementations for every function, referencing each other:

class Eq a where
(==), (/=) :: a -> a -> Bool
x /= y = not (x == y)
x == y = not (x /= y)

This way you can implement == or /=, and you get the other for free.

For me, the one new idea that made me understand why type classes are awesome was the read function: it's polymorphic on its return type. This means that you always give it a String and it returns whatever you need. This also means that you can have polymorphic constants--maxBound is the maximum of any bounded numeric type, so you can use it as an Int or a Float and it will always have the right value.

Overall, I now think that type classes are awesome. However, I also don't think a parallel to OOP is particularly helpful--I also learned OOP well before functional programming and found it easier to understand type classes by looking at how they were used than by comparing them to interfaces or templates.
The livestream was awesome again too - it's up here: http://www.twitch.tv/notch/b/302823358

Though I made the dreadful mistake of watching it with comments on: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2011/12/20/troll-at-notch/
Yes. You could expect it to bounce off the walls of the pipe, though.
Very interesting post!

What I also find fascinating is the way words shape the way we see the world, instead of letting the world shaping the words we use.

I believe that we are creating artificial limits between jobs. Unless you are coding some really complex piece of software, programming is not that hard, at least not as "engineeringy" hard as electrical or civil engineering.
edit and throw that line into the top of the article, that is a killer quote
You mean...somewhat like this?

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-quantum-levitating-video...

Only somewhat; it's a different set-up, of course.
Just an FYI: it crashes while trying to open it on my iPhone 3G (displays the splash screen, then exits to springboard.)

Love the idea, though. :)
There's a similar demo at the Exploratorium in San Francisco - you can drop disks of different materials (and with different cutouts) through the electromagnet and see the different rates at which they drop. I recall it also had a thoughtful warning sign instructing folks to keep their (magnetic stripe) BART cards away from the electromagnet!
The "Backwards compatibility, no matter the cost"
mentaility is costing us dearly in the quality of
the tools we have work with in the future, while
providing us no relevant new benefits.

That is only because you don't have a vested interest in old code bases. (Taking a rough guess here: you're under 30?)
Try comparing the deleting of a large file on ext3 and ext4.

On ext3 it can take 20 minutes to delete a file that in ext4 is deleted in a few seconds. That is including a followup "sync".

It is an obsolete filesystem.
Clojure-CLR has a new home on GitHub
Big Victory for Internet Freedom - Veoh vs. UMG Decision Upheld
This is entirely the wrong priority.

I’ve been speaking to app & website developers about BrowserID
and Apps for a few weeks, and the feedback has been great —
webdevs & entrepreneurs are very aware of the dangers of relying
on Facebook, Google, or Apple as the bridges to distribution or users.

I think the dangers of "relying on Facebook" et al are thoroughly outweighed by the effects of those entities taking the web hostage, transforming it into an oligarchy with inappropriate influence on the government as well as the daily web surfing activities of their users.

What we need from you, Mozilla, is not "a better way to sign in", or better support for whatever your vision of a web app store is. We need Web Intents (http://webintents.org/), or your iteration of it. We need you to create a kick-ass UI for this. We need you to help take back the web before it succumbs to mega corporations entirely. Please, Mozilla, have the foresight to recognize what's really at stake here.
I use a modified version of molokai: http://winterdom.com/2008/08/molokaiforvim

I like the look of solarized, but in practical use it doesn't have enough contrast for me.
I agree - type overloading says templates to me rather than inheritance. C++'s tuple class lets you do some of the cool listy type things you can do in Haskell. Using typedef tuple<double, double> FloatPoint and taking it from there seems a lot more like the Haskell example and would be less code - one line each for the typedefs and a one-line function to implement <<. (Not taking anything away from Haskell, which I'm completely in love with.)
Yes. It would hang there. That was one of the demonstrations of why superconductors are so cool back in the day. I remember seeing those nitrogen(I think) liquid cooled super conductors holding a magnet above them.
>For example, unlike Windows, there is no free and convenient svn utility on the Mac.

What's wrong with doing "brew install svn" ?
IE6 is dead, Firefox lives, and Mozilla is (still) awesome
Do you remember the Johnny Cash song "I've Been Everywhere... Chicago, Reno, Fargo"? Sometimes I think my resume reads like that.

After I added those lines, I got a 25-30% increase in responses.
Hasn't this already been done: https://github.com/kanaka/noVNC
> Can you give me an example of a question that isn't located in glassdoor.com and is "diverse but not hard".

Sorry, `diverse' is an attribute of the distribution of questions you ask. Not of any single question. If for each interview you take a random question from glassdoor.com (and perhaps even tweak it a bit, if you feel like it), that might even meet the definition of a diverse but not too hard selection. (Unfortunately, I know almost nothing about glassdoor.com, and what kind of questions they have.)
So I would guess you guys have few thousand user accounts? How many stay active after a week if you don't mind me asking?
My point was that most good coders can implement a designer's UI a lot faster than the UI designers.

For almost all situations I think you are better off getting two developers with complementing skills rather than two jack-of-all-trades that can do "everything". If you can only afford one person then seriously consider how to contract out some tricky parts of the weaker skills to an expert. Then you have a good foundation to build on.
The True Technological Divide
Last fall we had the release of the iPhone 4S, Steve Jobs's passing, the launch of a $35 tablet in India. Reactions show the radical differences in what technology means around the world.
Having implemented AKS in Python and Sage, it can get pretty slow - obviously, nowhere near a good probabilistic test even to a staggering degree of certainty. That said, most of the algorithm is very quick. It might be smart to run its basic compositeness tests, do a pseudoprime test, and only do the polynomial mod operation if the number passes.
That error message is a Twitter bug that has cropped up in like the past two months. Another one is "User Does Not Exist." Refresh the page and if you RTed, you should see it has gone through in both cases. I don't work for Twitter and am not defending their censorship of things such as Trending Topics. Just telling what's a fact here and reflects my own experience. Others have had these messages crop up too and have tweeted about them. Refreshing the page fixes it.
Of course, with SOPA they won't just take the one addon down, but the entire domain.
The Company That Generated 400,000 Calls To Congress About SOPA
Iceland is a Nordic country but not a Scandinavian country. At least, that's the definition the people in the Nordic countries use.

Iceland is often mentioned as a site for cloud computing, given its mid-Atlantic location and access to geothermal power and cooling. For example, GreenQloud has Amazon-compatible APIs and offers 100% carbon neutral hosting. They've also been selling to American enterprises. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them since it's mentioned in many of the top search results for "Iceland cloud computing."

American companies are still required to uphold US law, so American data even hosted overseas is still subject to "warrantless handovers of data." Eg, if the FBI came with a national security letter to a US company, then that company would be required to present that data no matter where it's located.

The only advantage I can see for doing this is if the company itself was under suspicion (vs. customers of the company) then at least the company would know of any such investigation.
I see what you are saying and I think there are short-term and long-term consequences. Certainly an injunction hurts consumers in the short-term since they have less choice. The patent-advocate would argue that in the long-term this model rewards innovators more and thus more people invest in innovation, helping consumers over the long term.

You are correct that my personal opinion is in favor of no patent protection. However my original point was that Apple's patent actions have had significant short-term impact that hurts consumers. You can certainly make an argument that there is a long-term positive impact, but I do not believe that Apple is in any way harming the patent system itself.
Maybe the ISO committee is conspiring to destroy C with mediocrity so that a shiny new systems language can take its place, correcting C's deeper warts in the process.

That would be nice, if only I believed it.
Yes, I realize this, but since it's only "reserved" in the specification and the compiler doesn't enforce this, there is a massive amount of code that does this today.

The spec could contain, "don't add any bugs into your C programs" but that doesn't magically mean that everyone would write bug free code.

Reserving a namespace and not having a mechanism to enforce it was a massive fail on the part of the standards committee.
Not quite, though that's part of what the problem was. There's a mechanism (fsync) for forcing the changes in a particular file to be written to disk. As a result of the consistency guarantees made by the "data=ordered" mode, synchronizing a single file often forces the filesystem to make other, unrelated writes to the disk as well. In the worst case the entire cache can be forced to disk. The end result is substantially more disk activity than would be expected.
I like Araxis Merge, especially the edit in place feature.

http://www.araxis.com/merge_mac/index.html

It does directory comparison. Kaleidoscope seemed pretty, but not as powerful.
Brilliantly written piece. Though I never knew about LISP back then (and I can't claim to be as brilliant as the guys he's describing), I do remember very clearly when in my final High School project I did a web application with Java and PHP and the bullshit of XML (back in the time when J2EE was the bee's knees) and unsound engineering almost turned me off programming. Haskell and Python got me back into it, though.
Everyone's Mixtape
Hah, I can't help feeling that this describes me pretty well (not brilliant, maybe, but everything else :)). I should be worried about it, of course, but somehow I'm not--perhaps it's because I have limited ambition. Or maybe it's just the job market right now.

I used to really like Lisp. I still do, even. But now I've gotten caught up in Haskell which--despite being a completely different language to Lisp--is actually more of the same. If I replace Lisp with Haskell in the article, then it fits even more. Eerie, really.

Now that I'm relatively depressed about my future "on a soda fountain or doing yard work" I can go do something useful and enjoy my break.
Ask HN: What are some cool gifts for entrepreneurs?
for web entrepreneurs things like domain names, hosting, dropbox storage etc... but what about for entrepreneurs in other areas, like solar tech or bio or regular business?
Apache log4php 2.2.0 released
cool. good job!
MITx online courses
At the time of writing, the linked site is down, but I found what I suspect is a similar demonstration at http://www.bbc.co.uk/bang/handson/magneticcopper.shtml
Mozilla is contributing to the Web Intents standardization and implementation effort, and in fact Mozilla's Open Web Apps project and Web Intents are being designed to work together and to benefit each other greatly (just as BrowserID and Open Web Apps are being designed to benefit each other).

To be more concrete: When a web page uses an intent like "upload a photo", Firefox will check to see if any of your "apps" support that intent. For example, if Flickr has an OWA app and you have already installed it, then Firefox will instantly ask if you want to choose one of your Flickr photos to upload. If you click an intent that the browser doesn't already have a handler for, it can offer to install an app from the web to handle the intent.

Open Web Apps is part of the infrastructure to turn Web Intents from a low-level API into a complete user experience. And BrowserID is also part of that integrated experience. (In the full vision for BrowserID where the browser manages your identities, you can do things like install an app and be "logged in" instantly without creating an account or typing a password.)
I remember a place where I worked where they'd show users a big table with dozen of statistical numbers and percents everywhere. I kept saying to just show one number (The relevent %) because users didn't care about all these numbers. In fact, it'd make everything harder to understand.

But, "the leay way says to do something and iterate based on feedback" they said. So, a couple of months and iterations later, it was all redesigned with a single number: the important percent.

A trick to help focus on the important stuff is to ask: "If I ask a user that doesn't care at all about my product and is extremely busy, what should I show to make it interesting (Or convenient)?"
Mozilla as an organisation is extremely transparent. It discloses as much as it legally and practically can.

That said, there are some things that simply cannot be disclosed.

Does that hurt Mozilla's mission? I doubt it. It is simply part of the operational process.

Have you seen Firefox with Bing btw?

http://www.firefoxwithbing.com/
Put strong magnet in small tupperware box. Put box on beach, collect fines of magnetic material. Transfer many fines to a clear pot, mix with mineral oil. Tape strong magnet to outside of clear pot, see magnetic field in 3D.
Note that that only applies in the US; not every jurisdiction recognizes the right to parody, and the Apple store may choose to enforce the lowest common denominator, or any other capricious policy they choose.

Also, the constitution does not mention the right to parody. It doesn't even exist in the section of US code describing fair use (17 USC 107), just in the history of case law surrounding fair use. Parody gets interpreted by the courts as part of the test to determine fair use, and not always in favor of the parodist.
Twitter to open source code from newly-acquired Whisper Systems
Rather the opposite.
http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/20...

Here a similar thing happened to B777
I just hope Web Intents makes it into the actual release - and in a way that is usable by normal users. Seems to me this should be a priority, instead of putting all that effort into yet another single sign-on fantasy.

If this happens as part of a large integrated experience as you promised that's fine, but I fear that you are taking on too much, going for a complex and over-engineered package that may never be ready or actually usable, instead of concentrating on this one single important thing which really needs to get done.
Minus the 3/5ths compromise of course...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

Committees are all about compromise and compromises are usually a worse solution in everyone's eyes. I'm not saying C14 threads are as bad as slavery, but they are a compromise that I'm sure no one will prefer to their native thread library.

I'm a bit surprise that ISO is even attempting to do generic threads. Who is this really a problem for? We have oodles of libraries that provide cross platform thread libraries. I don't see why we need the C standard to specify one.
If Mozilla switched Firefox's default search engine from Google to Bing, I would how many Firefox users would manually switch back to Google. I also wonder how many users would even realize that they were using Bing instead of Google. <:)