skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Java is an extremely confusing language for newcomers. While it's "simple" in comparison to languages like C++ and Haskell, the perceived inconsistencies (do I use == or equals()? length, length(), or size()?) really drive newcomers--and some veterans--up a wall. Throw that in with the insanity of generics, the "everything must be within a class" concept, the mess between objects and primitive types (ints AREN'T Integers!), the verbosity (and inconsistency in naming things), and the lazy-ass exceptions that only vaguely sometimes give you a general idea of where things go wrong, and it's horrible for new programmers.

Javascript is relatively strange, but it's much easier for me to teach JS to somebody than Java. I find it much more easy to explain how and why things work in javascript, whereas when someone asks me why something in Java works this way, I respond with an "I have no clue--they just decided it'd be a good idea and I think it's terrible."
To me, it's as if 1984 were the past few decades' events and attitudes condensed into a few weeks.
I think Steve Jobs will be right again, Dropbox is a feature, a great feature to be sure, but still just a feature. iCloud works fine without it and eventually as Apple typically does, once more features are added, the need for Dropbox will lessen.
Some better followup on the case so far: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/fr...
Ask HN: What About Haskell Don't You Like
This is targeted towards those who use haskell regularly. What, if anything, makes you wish haskell were slightly different. It's by far the best language I know, with only lisps coming close, but I feel like it's missing something or doesn't do something right, I just can't figure out what.
Meet Facebook’s Compassion Czar
Who here did not think of Bruce Schneier after reading in the lead paragraph: "...that’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts"?
If terrorists have the ability to bioengineer and deliver viruses, then I'm thinking published research is the least of our worries. It would be like keeping information on how to increase the yield of a thermonuclear warhead from 5MT to 10MT secret: if that's a concern, we're already hooped.
Do you have some links to your posts? I have seen people defend the concept of being able to go after sites that exist solely to profit of others work, but most of those disagree with the methods SOPA employs.
Please flag the article. It's a Antivaccer piece.
There's no way this will get picked up in HN, but that is awesome.
IPad 3: What We Know So Far
Interesting. I'm not a lawyer, but doesn't the fact that the law doesn't support a certain verdict obviate the need for nullification?
FWIW: Even the dumbest possible implementation of this, which is "Send someone an email 1 day after signup and 6 days after signup, with both goals just trying to use the service again" prints money in my experience.
Plantronics Headset - Offers a Number of Different Wireless Solutions
Plantronics is the leading manufacturer, designer and marketer of the lightweight communication handset products. The well-groomed Plantronics wireless headset has stupendous sound quality and hands-free choice of up to 100 meters from your working place.
Build your own company :-)
There is no limit of imagination.
America's had a decade of airport frustations and no new (successful) attacks to re-inflame their fears. While it may be impossible to undo the existence of the TSA, a "common sense" reform initiative would probably be very popular, possibly even bi-partisan.

Sadly, the biggest obstacle would probably be the fear of eliminating jobs, which no politician wants to be known for, even if those jobs are mostly a waste of human labor. This is a broader problem of government bloat, and probably out of the scope of this discussion.
Talk to the guy behind gigablast.com
yes, and I should also make it so that "recent" items are noted somehow
15 years ago today: Apple Computer, Inc. acquired NeXT Software Inc.
I can help you out. Shoot me an e-mail and let's talk some more.
Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make When Upgrading to SQL 2012
basement dwelling nerds probably already know web programming.
Congratulations guys, nice to see some Warwick Grads doing so well.
Even though the mutations required to get a h5n1 virus contagious between humans haven't been published, the process to generate them has been, and it is trivial to duplicate.

H5N1 in the hands of "bad" people is a matter of weeks or perhaps months (provided they have ferrets and the aviary strain of h5n1).
I don't see the problem here. Information, just like everything else, can be used as a weapon. Some information needs to be kept out of the hands of people who aren't responsible enough to use it. This is standard practice with other things.

The knee-jerk reactions against "censorship" in this case doesn't make sense. From what I've gathered from other articles about this research is that it basically lays out a procedure to take bird flu and turn it into a potential pandemic-causing virus. And we're not talking highly controlled lab experiments here, this is something that a rag-tag group could do in a regular building (again, from what I've inferred).

The potential downside to having this information freely available far outweighs the benefits. Any legitimate research group will surely be able to get their hands on the information.
Actually, it's not the US that's blocking you. It's your own country. You see, some company in your country bought the rights to that media and plans to repackage it (maybe dub it) and play it to you with their own commercials. They don't want the US serving you the content as well because that would make them compete with the providers for the very content they bought from them.

I hate it to, but in this rare instance the US actually isn't behaving hypocritically.
Visualizing Twitter Retweets Graphs using Python, R and Gephi
The disc versus the download: is the CD really set to disappear?
With a standard prompt, you can see the previous output from the program and user input. But a popup window has no context, no history.

Of course that's just my opinion. If it could help teach kids good programming skills then it should be used used.
I'm all for vim, but you're mad if you think first-time coders should pick that up before even writing their first piece of code. Talk about barriers to entry and unintuitive behaviors...

I think the most viable environments for absolute beginners will be online ones that include an REPL and editor, using either JS or something that compiles to JS or to anything else on the backend, so even browser choice is irrelevant. Then you don't have to teach how to load a JS file into a document and so on.
In the particular case of python, I see none of the problems you mention. In pretty much all Linux distros, it already comes installed and ready to use (i.e., just execute it, no need to know paths or anything).

The same happens on Windows, once you run the installer; there you can, too, just edit and double click it. All you need is a .py file on the desktop.
>This seems like a bad idea. At the same time we're (hopefully!) keeping the information away from the bad guys, we're also handicapping those who could be building us protection from it.

The concern is that it is much much easier for those who would cause harm to use this information than for those who would use it to create defenses. With such an asymmetry it makes sense to restrict access.

>I've got to believe that anyone skilled enough to be able to use the information

From what I've gathered from various articles is that the process described doesn't require any high level skills or facilities. Apparently it's frighteningly easy to nudge bird flu to be highly contagious in humans.
The Halting Problem: Thought Experiment or The End of Computer Science?
I'm never hurt by feedback like that. I'm grateful for it.

Maybe I'm working the confidence question in too much. I'll watch out for that.

I want to get really good at doing useful interviews. I need feedback like yours.
I recently moved back into a suburban but still metro area setting after living in a city with a lot of college friends for a year. I find it so much more difficult to convene with a lot of people who share the same passion for certain ideas as I do. College just made it so easy to meet up with people, all I had to do was walk down the quad, dorm, student center -- and I could be lost in conversation for the next hour.
Apple’s App Store made big gains in China in 2011
I'm more interested in the why than the how... What will you be using the funding for?
Many fliers refuse to turn off electronic gadgets
dat shit cray
Language and Semantic Issues
The "Suarez case" highlights the close relation between languages and cultures. Words can change their meaning completely in a different environment and context.
I graduated from one of the top 5 British universities in the mid 90s with a 2:1 degree in History, and I have to say that it was one of the easiest thing I ever did. I had class and lecture time of 4-6 hours a week, and spent another 8 hours reading and writing essays. The essay requirement, which contributed almost half to the degree grade, was only about 12 3,000 word essays a year. I had so much free time that I turned my part time job into a full time job, working 35 hours a week.

Of course, I should have worked harder, and I would have learned more if I had, but I was 19 and 20 years old and it was just so easy to get a good degree without working at all. I know I was far from alone in this.

Every degree course is not the same, and no doubt others may have worked long hours to earn theirs, but my own experience has left me with no respect for UK degrees, to the extent that when I read CVs from candidates I consider a third level degree irrelevant.
I support using JavaScript as a first language. If for nothing else there are millions of code snippets just a short "right click -> view source" away. Granted these may not be the most ideal examples, but it enables tinkering. One thing that always frustrated me about the "easy" languages to learn (Python, Ruby, etc) is you still have to figure out how to download something and then the first programs just write out text to a console window. It's hard to see at first how learning one of the "easy" languages translates into building cool stuff.

Having access to such a vast array of samples, plus something like Khan Acadamy teaching the "right way" is just awesome to me.
Previously posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3377641
ICANN: 2011 Annual Report Published
Jury nullification has to do with returning a "Not Guilty" verdict in the face of evidence that would suggest otherwise.

What you are talking about it a "hung jury" where the 5% person is able to prevent a unanimous "Guilty" verdict. Depending on the state, the requirement for conviction may be unanimity or something less (11 to 1, 10 to 2, I don't remember if it goes any less). In this cases, the prosecutors may choose to retry the defendant - if you think about it, if the prosecutors decided to try him once, why not twice? The odds are the same the second time around (i.e. the odds of not getting the 5% person on the jury).

Regarding "bogus convictions", the jury only gets to make its decision when a high enough evidentiary threshold is met. Otherwise, the judge must throw the case out for not meeting minimum requirements.

Think of it like this (note that this is my own approximate guesses taken from my law school class on Criminal Law) - "Reasonable doubt" may be a 95% confidence threshold for the jury to convict. For the decision to get to the jury, the judge has to decide that the evidence is at least 75% confidence level in his opinion. Its only 75% for the judge because he is not the finder of fact and the jury can reasonably decide that what the judge views as 75% certainty of guilt is actually 95% in their view.

So to sum up, the situation is not as dire as you would suggest. I agree that jury nullification can be a big problem in the wrong situations (racist communities, etc) and that is why the law tries to minimize its impact (e.g. defense attorneys cannot mention jury nullification to a jury during the trial) while preserving defendants' rights to a jury of peers.

Like seemingly every aspect of law, there isn't a clear cut answer either way.
I think the sexiness of the Nest is one aspect, but the one that you're overlooking is its learning abilities. I believe one of the founders worked with Apple on the iPhone/iPod and he seems to be bringing that design/engineering to Nest as well. The hardware is important yes, but the software is what makes it a killer product.
How journalists can use Google Refine to clean ‘dirty’ data sets
Innovation vs fast-follow: with Smart Case, Samsung's just thumbing their nose
> If I had thought it through, I might have been able to offer white lies to cover the questions they asked.

I didn't intend to suggest white lies; I consider the responses I suggested entirely truthful, just carefully chosen. :)

> As it was, they didn't ask me anything so nice as "do you have a problem with the law in question"; they asked several questions related to that, including "do you have any feelings about drug legalization".

That could certainly make it more difficult. Depending on the wording of the questions, you may or may not have had the ability to give a truthful answer that would keep you on the jury. I certainly would not advocate lying.

> They didn't just ask if I could return a guilty verdict, either -- they asked if I would return a guilty verdict based on the law as explained by the judge if I felt that the facts supported the verdict. To be honest, I did answer yes to this one, although I did feel a twinge and my hesitation was palpable.

"if I felt that the facts supported the verdict" gives you all the leeway you need to say "yes" without reservation.
The words that make HN tick
Attempting to get a weapon on board a plane carries a risk of being shot. In the head. I'm not that surprised that people don't try it.
Except that there's already laws that say building circumvention devices is a felony.

And with that other bill, where the US can arrest anyone, anywhere, anytime, it's not good enough to not be American.
That says a little bit more. Do you treat it as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem, or as a classification problem? It seems like a sequential decision making problem, so RL is appropriate but AFAIK there is no RL algorithm that generalises over states while still retaining some error bounds. I suppose you could brute-force a Bayesian solution via MCMC.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Online Degree and Distance Learning
Bitcoin now is like the internet was in 1985. There is a huge stack of infrastructure yet to be built in order to deliver on the early pre-hyped promises. I don't think anybody understands this domain well enough to predict the outcome; it's very clearly in an experimental phase. It may well be ridiculous to believe Bitcoin will replace the dollar (much as some believed the internet would replace all manner of things which still happily co-exist), but surely more ridiculous to dismiss it when the experiment has barely begun.
The top Facebook game of 2011 surprisingly wasn&#8217;t built by Zynga
Tiny planets endure ordeal inside a star
Note: So ok, they released through a company name one step removed, but along with the charger and flat connector cable, this family business just isn't even pretending any more.

The final picture says it all.
Library Copyright Alliance Sends Support Letter to Representatives Re: SOPA
pg one wrote in an essay about how if you manage to stumble onto something tabu you probably found something interesting (heavily paraphrased). A lot of people are seriously offended at this article.... just sayin'.
The United States has been pretty effective at shutting down wholesale internet piracy.

What many (most?) commentators fail to understand is that the entertainment industry is not interested in anything that account for less than 1% of the population. If 2.6 million americans wish to use some wacky "Direct Connect" or "Darknet" or "Unregistered Usenet" system - have at it. You are round off error.

It's when it moves into the wholesale category of piracy - ala:
http://www.google.com/search?q=adele+mp3+download

Then they have a problem. As do the artists.

It would be interesting to see a study of "Health of Entertainment Industries with heavy emphasis on Content Resale" vs "Protection of Intellectual property (copyrights, trademarks, internet policing" in various countries.

HBO and Adele may be doing okay - how many thousands of artists can't make a living (and don't even try) - because they would be just ripped off.

Don't get me wrong - I'm opposed to SOPA, but not because I don't think it wouldn't help the entertainment industry - I'm certain it would. I'm opposed to SOPA because I care more about the internet industry (which SOPA would hurt).

At the end of the day - it's really a question of which we value more - creation of high-value entertainment content, or individual rights, freedoms, and the entire internet industry.

I know where my vote is.
Reading this I reminded of the saying "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail". It's not surprising to see John Resig leaning towards using Javascript. There is a lot of research into teaching introductory programming. It would be nice to see some of that referenced in making the decision. You know, base it at least in part on science rather than just opinion.
Canadians to start HIV vaccine clinical trials
Dentist Deals
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I'm not familiar with any of the mentioned companies but I'm curious, what exactly does make products such as Marketo "enterprisey"? Just more features that you don't need right now?
I think ads would be reasonable. Especially if they integrate with the design and aren't all flashy and distracting. Another monetization strategy might be to make the web version free, but charge for mobile apps. There could be free ad-supported mobile versions as well.

Stripe is fantastic payment gateway to integrate with. I despise paypal, but it wouldn't hurt to throw a paypal donate button up in the meantime either.
I realize this article is from 2007, but here in 2011 how about programmers just being programmers?

I'm so sick of how programmers are supposedly "rock stars", "ninjas", "martial artists" or whatever the fuck else.

You don't see astrophysicists comparing themselves (in large numbers) to ninjas. Because they are Goddamn Astrophysicists, and that's cool enough already.

As a profession let's grow the fuck up and just own being programmers.
FFS I want to see this happen. We can do it. Then do bigger things, serve these notices to online music stores. Bascially make buying something legally impossible due to SOPA. It would be wonderful.
That is the reason for the existence of the function isNaN.

Plus, NaN returns a generated object, so that result is expected

({}) !== ({})
Does anyone know if there is a similar law about jury nullification in Canada?

I hear about a lot of these little known facts about the law but they're usually US centric.
How does this compare with, say, Marketo?
For one, I can't even find out how to sign up for Marketo. I don't want to chat with a sales specialist, I want to start setting up and importing events, and making filters/campaign triggers. They have way too many products -- it makes me wonder if they even spent enough time working on the lifecycle marketing product of theirs. I want a company that just works on that one thing and does it amazingly well.
FedEx Issues Apology For Chucking a Computer Monitor Over a Fence
Before the TSA, we had xray luggage scanners and metal detectors world wide. Now how the majority of the public interacts with the TSA at airports, you go through a metal detector or body xray and xray luggage scanners. What else has changed?
Any link on Dev Bootcamp in SV?
Using Basketweaver with GitHub (aka, How to ditch pypi.python.org)
Of course, the "buy home computer" step was a lot harder back in those days.
Java isn't really simple in comparison to Haskell--Java is full of warts and inconsistencies while Haskell is simple, consistent and elegant. The reason Haskell is viewed as hard is that it takes basically nothing from languages you already know. If you don't know any languages, it's actually a great starting point.
For precisely this reason, third-party libraries should not be including <stdnoreturn.h> in their external headers unless they are specifically intended to work only on C1x.

Under the _C_SOURCE scheme they certainly shouldn't be defining that macro, since the program which is including them has likely already defined it and you cannot have a duplicate macro definition. If they care, they should instead be testing its current value with #if, not changing it - ie, if a library requires C11x then it would use something like:

#if _C_SOURCE < 20110101
#error C11x or better required for this library
#endif
Most colleges do a poor job of providing CS education. Worse yet, CS is a poor substitute for the education needed to do software engineering.
Both Google and Microsoft were able to independently produce ODF implementations from the spec.
Here you go: https://www.google.com/settings/ads/onweb/
Co-founder Ron Wayne's stash of early Apple documents
Search engines are expensive to run. Roughly speaking, to do it well, you have to keep an up-to-date copy of the internet in RAM.
Wouldn't it also have been incorrect? From memory (cant find source sorry) it was Steve who approached DB and opened discussion. Also considering his personality traits it probably was his decision to attempt to buy them over the collective wisdom of people at Apple.

NB if anyone has some source to the contrary please share it here.
may be its just me....
The copy in both places (picplum and custora)is too confusing to understand the service they offer.
Record syntax is sucky.

`>>=` and `>>` are idiomatic but rub me up the wrong way. I prefer `=<<` and `<<` (`<<` I even have to define myself).

I wish `Monad` extended `Applicative`. I wish this sort of refactoring wasn't a breaking change.

I wish wrappers like `Endo` and `Kleisli` weren't necessary. (I know why they're necessary, and it's probably the right trade-off, but...)

I wish `mempty`, `mappend` and `mconcat` had better names.
Anybody have a link to the original video Drew posted here on HN? Was is the video on the DropBox homepage up until recently?
A quick how-to on bypassing the TSA no-fly list:

1. Buy a plane ticket under someone else's name. Presumably yours is blocked/flagged due to the airlines being able to check the no-fly list.

2. Use that ticket to forge a boarding pass in your name. Use this, along with your official ID, at the security checkpoint. All the TSA does is read it and validate date/time/what the know of flights off the top of their head. Nothing in their setup validates your boarding pass against airline records or the no-fly list.

3. At the gate, hand them the original boarding pass. They'll check it against computer records, but won't bother to check your ID against the pass.

4. Congratulations, you've bypassed a critical portion of American airline security.

This, honestly, is most of why the recent "advanced screening" systems piss me off. Our current security measures are woefully ineffective because of these kinds of loopholes, but instead of plugging those loopholes we simply pile on more half-assed systems.

The no-fly list could be a great tool for us, if used properly. Instead it's nearly trivial to circumvent for the bad guys and an enormous pain in the ass for any honest person who happens to wander into a name conflict.
Google just bought a 3,000,000 square foot building on 8th avenue.

Seems like they were able to find space.
Yeah, I didn't get this either. What's wrong with:

function getData() {}
var getData = new getData();