skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
can you shoot us an email at contact(at)codecademy(dot)com? would love to figure out what went wrong. thanks!
This has been partially rectified in ICS. Some Indic scripts, such as Devanagari, Bengali, and Tamil, are functional, while others, such as Malayalam, are not. It's certainly appalling that a device designed in a post-Unicode world would even have this problem to begin with.
It's great to see a language which doesn't ignore 20th and 21st century programming language theory. It's tremendously boring waiting for the future to happen.... Anyhow, the type system looks quite interesting.

The choice of LLVM for C interface and performance is also really sensible.

I was surprised to find the language implemented in Scala and Java though. Perhaps there will be some kind of bootstrap, or maybe the ability to access the java libraries is intentional.

Without proper documentation it is a bit hard to evaluate this more fully at this stage. I looked but didn't find many docs yet. Certainly a language to watch.
I had a chance to visit the Vasa museum in Stockholm, and the Why was explained as follows - the king was an odd fella and builders couldn't question or object his directives. He wanted an extra tall ship and that's exactly what he got. The end.
Also, can someone residing outside US publish in Kindle Store? I see they send payments via checks, but it was not clear whether it's global.
The way people copy each other's linguistic style reveals their pecking order
Yep updated my post here and will do if I get any specific errors etc. cheers
"Yesterday's paper, yesterday's news":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3410968
Thanks so much for your help! I will definitely try it out.
You mean to say Bush bailed out GM, Citibank, AIG and other long list of companies??? Please at least know a little about the subject before you jump in to comment.
"""Working 40 hours a Week is Nothing if You Enjoy what You’re Doing"""

40 hours a week, yeah.

But people also work crazy hours, like 80+ hour weeks. And then you also have to add the commuting time in some cases.

So, maybe even "Working 80 hours a Week is Nothing if You Enjoy what You’re Doing", but:

1) You could still be enjoying it for the wrong reasons.

2) It still takes it's toil on you.

3) It's still bad for your family life / spouse / children etc.

4) It can still lead to a much inferior outcome (because of exhaustion, not thinking straight etc). There's a reason commercial pilots are allowed to work for X hours consecutively and no more, and no, the reason is not "union pressure".

5) You have to balance what you get out of this too, because a few people overworking because they "enjoy what they do" (e.g out of college kids doing CRUD shit in the framework du jour) can kill wages/working environment for people who want to do it professionally and don't think it as the be-all-end-all of their life.
Jgrubb, as a 53-year-old musician/programmer/entrepreneur (formally trained [in parallel, mostly] in the first two), may I posit that you're not a late-comer to anything yet!
"You don't need to do any 'migration thing', you just add the column to the DB and choose a sensible default value?"

Taking the team I worked with at the BBC as an example:

1) There were staging, integration and production environments. Staging and integration would often not be aligned with production, or even one another, because we might find a bit of code turned out not to be production suitable/needed. If this happened we would have to drop the database back to a known, good state. You can't have columns with constraints left around when the code which might have satisfied those constraints is reverted. Doing it without migrations would have been idiotic to say the least.

2) Developers work on different features in different branches, often collaborating. Different features apply new attributes to the db schema. It's important for a developer to know his DB is in the correct state when he starts hacking. You do that with migrations.

Because you almost completely remove the need for schema definition (and what little of it you do, you can do in app. code) you simply don't need the migrations any more. Using mongo means you can pretty much just export your applications domain without having to coerce it into the relational model.

"I don't see what you gain by having both 'undefined' and 'null'."

They mean totally different things. Undefined means that the field has never been explicitly set, null means the field has been set. This means you know what's been backfilled and what hasn't - you can't tell without extra metadata in mysql. Also, in mysql if you provide a null default then every row has to be updated.

"It's like BASIC allowing you to use a new variable without declaring it. It may be convenient but nobody calls it a good idea."

I don't know BASIC but you can put Perl into a certain configuration that allows this. That makes for horrible scoping issues that aren't analogous or applicable to what we're talking about.
108 and I've cut down a lot this past year
but thats for a company name... i am talking for personal stuff? i have my name as a .com, .net and .ie (being irish). I have projects i started years ago and registered domains for. so, im just wondering about domains registered for personal use?
Please give us a syntax which allows for quoting a parent comment. I would vote for a '>' at the beginning of a line.
> The 'occupy' post did satisfy me intellectually - I don't have a position on the
> politics either way, but the explanation of 'battle tactics', how they developed
> by non-military people and how they can be used 'on the street' was
> intellectually interesting.

Read The Art of War (I would recommend some annotated version, can't point to an specific one since I'm only familiar with spanish translations). Then go take part in some picketing, and please please write an article with factual and accurate data about tactics. Mail me, count with my upvote and I'll participate on any discussion related to tactics. This blogpost is factually wrong and amateurish as a discussion on tactics, also full of wishful thinking apologetic of naive ideas about the military power of large groups of protesters.
It is also very surprising that the ceiling height on the ship is something like 160 cm (5'4") - people were that much shorter only few hundred years ago.
http://techpolish.com/best-blogging-platform-sites-and-softw... - here's a comparison of some popular platforms that you can personalize to get a recommendation unique to your need.

I'd say it depends on your purpose (e.g. personal blogging for your day-to-day realizations, philosophical epiphanies, etc.).

(Disclosure: TechPolish is my website.)
EDIT: fixed typo. moved link up.
WordPress - it has excellent usability as a core product, but its real power comes from the large library of free plugins - there's pretty much always a plugin for everything.

You can sign up for a free hosted version of WordPress at http://wordpress.com, though it has paid upgrades, or you can download the self-hosted version for free at http://wordpress.org.

You could even go with a webhost (like http://dreamhost.com) and use their one-click-install for WordPress (feel free to use the coupon code JACOBWG for $97 off one year of DreamHost... disclosure: I do NOT receive any referral money or benefits from that code - all benefits have been rolled into that code's discount).

If you're the "hacker" type, then check out http://jekyllrb.com/...
I've been using Wordpress for a couple of years. It's easy to use and extensible. If you aren't afraid of dipping your toes into some HTML/CSS/PHP than you can find a really good free/premium theme and some good plugins to make a good blog.

Just make sure you backup not only your database but themes because if you get malware, its really difficult to find out the source. Easiest thing to do is to revert to a clean copy, change passwords, and protect yourself!
I get the same result on google and in duckduckgo it doesn't appear. I think it's also worth pointing out that "/dev/urandom" doesn't show bolded (as in "we found the string in this particular search result") until the 25th or so result. I don't know if duckduckgo just shows the bolding less often or that it just sorts its results very awkwardly.
I had to go back to that page and go through it again using the cursor keys rather than the pg-dn button, because I hadn't realised the page did anything.
My New Years resolution: Finish 1.25 things per month.
Excellent
Will do more of that stuff as soon as I'm able to work less (soon)
Jazz is life
Happy to see that kind of sruff on hn :
Please give us a syntax which allows for quoting a parent comment.

Italic seems to work fine for that.
I owned an original Pre and was never much bothered by it being slow. But having to reboot it every night to make it less likely to crash while I was using it was a drag.

Oh, it did take forever to boot. Bad combination, that, frequent crashing and slow booting.

I think instability is less a sign of architectural problems than of simple failure to iron all the bugs out. I guess they were too busy adding features.
One of the examples in the repository is an implementation of malloc.

I tend to think of Go as an attempt to redefine what a systems programming language is (hence the "modern").

I don't think that there can be an established definition of what a modern systems language is, otherwise it would no longer be termed modern. Almost by definition theorists will differ on what the essential characteristics must be.
I have 7: The vanity domain I use for all my email, a domain for hosting puzzlehunts, a .name domain I've done nothing with, a domain with a vaguely puzzley name I am saving for some future use that will never happen, and four unused domains corresponding to sites that sounded like they'd be cool to make at one point or another, of various levels of silliness.
Works great. Impressive that you ported almost (if not all?) functionality.
Tumblr, if you are really interested in the ability to share other blogs quickly and be shared as well. It is also very easy to set-up, maintain, and can work on custom domains as well. You can even add Disqus to most themes if you want feedback and comments. I also love the +Follow feature, as it means that people are more likely to consume your content over just bare RSS feeds. Overall, it's a more expansive Twitter.

Wordpress would be the way to go if you want to have more control over your blog, but I always ended up tweaking the function of the blog more and writing less. Tumblr basically breaks that tinkering distraction and allows you to focus on your content.
Yeah, that's true. :)
If you have a function that returns a function, basically you need to rewrite things to lift the referenced state into the outer scope. In pseudo-C:

(void -> int) incrementer(int initial_value) {
int count = initial_value;
return lambda() { return count++; }
}

might be rewritten as:

struct hidden_environment_type {
int count;
}

int incrementer_lambda(hidden_environment_type *env) {
return env->count++;
}

void incrementer(hidden_environment_type *hidden_arg, int initial_value) {
hidden_arg->count = initial_value;
}

Now the caller will allocate a variable of type hidden_environment_type, and pass its address as the first (artificial) argument.

Note that lambda functions require a different calling convention to C function pointers, since they need to be passed a pointer to their environment in addition to their regular arguments. Introducing lambdas either requires some resolution of this complication, such as specialisation machinery (ie in C++11, templates provide the necessary specialisation). Another option is to use the environment-passing convention for every indirect call, possibly giving a minor performance hit for calling raw function pointers.

Another issue is that the size of an environment type depends on the code of a function involving it, so lambdas don't have uniform size unless some additional indirection is introduced, probably to heap storage (Apple's blocks extension to C takes this approach). This makes it either impossible or slightly more expensive to store lambda functions in data structures, depending on which implementation you choose.

After all this, your ownership/lifetime question boils down to "who is holding onto the instance of hidden_environment_type?", which is a pretty simple question to answer in C-like languages.
Scientific Answers to the Mysteries of Children’s Literature
Crowd Funding bill Stalls in Senate
A strange article. The only winning strategy was not to read it.

Regarding the Pre being slow, I for one never felt it was slow. I returned mine for two reasons, each of which had kept me on Treo and prevented me from moving to iPhone, each of which were horribly botched by Palm, and thus destroyed any barriers to switching I had. First,the keyboard on the Pre was terrible, just incredibly awful, and that was one of its big differentiators, and a huge reason I liked my Treo. Second, I had at that time many critical Palm apps that I'd spent a good deal of money on, as did most of Palm's existing customers, and absolutely NONE of them ran on WebOS, nor was there any upgrade plan in place.

The phone didn't feel slow, and on the contrary, the UI was way above its competitors.

This may be true:

"a former member of the WebOS app development team said the core issue with WebOS was actually Palm’s inability to turn it into a platform that could capture the enthusiasm and loyalty of outside programmers. There were neither the right leaders nor the right engineers to do the job, said this person, who declined to be named because he still had some ties to H.P."

At the time, IIRC, JWZ was very enthusiastic about the platform, but he could make almost no headway into writing apps for the damn device, but the failure seems to be one of Palm's leaders who didn't see the need to evangelize and recruit developers.
This is mind-blowing, I like how he uses transitions to empower content.

The transitions themselves are fantastic and like others in the thread I don't find them fancy at all, in fact I think they add movies like continuity to presentations for cheap, which if used wisely can enable story-telling style of information delivery.

I can see myself using it for info-graphics and tutorials, other than presentations, by making it do non-linear (zooming in/out or using hrefs) flow of content.

Oh now I realize why I liked it so much, it also removes the single most annoying feature of reading content on the web - the constant scrolling and zooming, like readability it alleviates that pain for you, by zooming in to the content that matters the most at this instant.
It's not exactly a short piece somebody could comment on straight away :)

I think it's a good introductory piece.
The writer should use his superior "military style" tactics to get a job.

Maybe their plan worked because the police decided it wasn't worth wading thru their feces and syringes every few hours.
91 Ways To Be A Better Developer
If you used the ruby 1.9 syntax then it wouldn't be. However, ruby 1.9 still supported the old syntax, so libraries in 1.9 could still be used with 1.8. There wasn't "one right way" to do things in ruby.
Sometimes "investor protection" means making sure that the bankers and lawyers get their 8%.
Complementary to this article is a book on Abstract Algebra that is released under the GNU Free Document license.

http://abstract.ups.edu/download/aata-original.pdf
As a long-term webOS user, I could not disagree with the conclusion of this article more. WebOS did not fail because of a decision to use WebKit, it "failed" (in marketing and commercial terms, not in technological terms) because of a lack of decent hardware, which is still the case today.

My own personal feeling is that the decision to put a web interpreter at the heart of webOS was inspired, I mean as an app developer what would you rather code in?

1. iOS - objective C.

2. Android & RIM - Java.

3. webOS - HTML5/CSS/JS.

webOS the platform is fantastic, but has never been seen on decent hardware (with the exception of the Pre3 which is an amazing phone, but was never officially released outside of a limited European release). If the open sourcing of webOS leads to decent hardware manufacturers like Samsung or HTC releasing devices, it still stands a chance.
Depends on whether you want to handle your own bandwidth and admin, or farm it out to someone else.

Personally, I'm very happy to be
http://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/
because I have control over whether things are public or just for a personal audience, lots of control over comments - and most importantly, threaded comments. I loathe non-threaded comment systems with a fiery passion.
""" When does "no" really mean no?"""

When the words "date rape, police, lawyer" are mentioned in a non casual manner.

Seriously, now, this is a really bizarre question.

People change their minds, especially in non-important areas of their lives, like purchase decisions.

If someone tells you "I'll never move in a third world country" that is more likely to remain a no than "I'll never buy a Honda".

In regards to purchases decisions, "no" means no for as long as:

1) the market does not change (i.e no new products introduced)
2) the peers/marketing influence on the person doesn't change
3) the attitude/lifestyle of the person doesn't change
4) the needs of the person doesn't change (including "perceived" needs)

i.e very rarely.

Someone could say "I'll never buy an X, my K rocks", and then:

1) Have a chance to use an X and conclude it's actually better.
2) X could actually get more popular so he feels peer-pressured to get one.
3) He is not as opinionated about X's maker anymore (or companies in general), because he's no longer 15.
4) The X version 3 is way better than both K and X version 1.
5) Things that thought mattered about K (like spec Y), he found out they don't really matter to him in actual use.

X could be an iPod and K a Creative Zen, for example.
Or X could be an Android phone, and K an iPhone.

Or vice-versa, but the main point is, in this context, no means almost nothing at all.
> frequent crashing and slow booting

That was the combo that made me ditch my BlackBerry (8900 Curve, great phone at the time otherwise) and move to the iPhone 4. At the mall, take out the phone to snap a picture, and whatdya know, the camera program crashes taking down the whole system with it. Reboot? I'll be lucky if it's back up and running by the time I get to the car.

EDIT: Yeah, obviously I'm lying out of my ass and should be downvoted. Because, you know, BlackBerry's still doing super-hot, and is clearly impeccable. There's no way anyone had problems with their BB and switched to Apple.
If your code heavily uses unicode texts, it will be easier to start with python 3, because all the iterators word on wide-chars instead of byte ones, and you don't have do some magic to handle them properly.
2012 resolution for new entrepreneurs
I refuse to use any operating system without glyphs for Unicode symbols such as Police Car's Revolving Light (U+1F6A8), See No Evil Monkey (U+1F648), Moyai (U+1F5FF), Love Hotel (U+1F3E9), and American Football (U+1F3C8).
This has always bothered me.

In what's typically called a 13th chord, the 11th is almost always omitted because it either clashes, or it changes the chord into something completely different. Stacking 3rds doesn't actually explain how jazz chords work. And it tends to produce corny voicings.

To make an analogy with computers, it feels like the classical notation is an abstraction layer which has been extended beyond its usefulness.
"Is it a waste of time if an artist spends a lifetime only thinking, then in the end write one poem that turns out to inspire thousands of people."

If people are coming to the site, then it has value. What is detrimental is what causes harm. What puts a smile on someone face, even if it is a simple desk, is probably more therapeutic than Prosac.
How to beat hashDos
It would be fascinating to analyze this in verbal communication. I've thought about this in the past, specifically in how idiomatic expressions, "inside jokes" and the like are disseminated through social groups. It always seems that certain individuals in a group are responsible for setting the tone and style of humor and colloquial expression, while the rest end up mimicing the leaders.

In a more practical sense, simply being able to recognize these signals would be very valuable in meetings, especially sales meetings involving pitching a group when it is unclear who the actual decision makers are.
I keep a (small) list of active awesome and interesting alternatives to C. Cyclone has been mentioned already, adding Deca now. the other two I know are:

* ATS http://www.ats-lang.org/#what_is_ats_good_for

* Clay http://claylabs.com/clay/
Been out of Berklee a few years, but a few nuggets that might shed light:

In Jazz theory, the 7th scale degree is part of the chord. C7 isn't C (C+E+G) plus a B♭; C7 is its own flavor of C chord, C + E + G + B♭.

More generally, the ^3 and the ^7 are the two most important notes in the chord. The ^3 tells you its quality (minor, major) and the ^7 tells you its, uh, seventhness (dominant, diminished, maj7). It's common for players to leave off the 1 and the 5; they're low-information notes, and those fingers are better put to use playing the tensions, which are "chord extensions", the 9th, 11th and 13th. Critically, all three tensions are considered part of the chord, unlike Csus4, which means substitute a 4 for the 3, and don't play the 3.

C9, C11 and C13 can exist, but you won't often find C13 in particular like that. There's a whole set of memorizable rules to tell you which chord scales go with which chords performing which functions; if that C is a I chord in the measure, you're not likely to see a C11. You may see a C7(11), or C7(add11), which is IIRC the C chord plus an 11th note - but not the 9th. Then there's C7(#11), which you'll often find when C is the IV chord, 'cause the IV chord gets a Lydian scale.. but now I forget how that explains anything.

C+E+G+B♭+D+F+A can also be looked at as D-/C7, and often is. That whole "Upper Triad" polychord stuff is a whole semester to itself.
The same thing happened with SUN NeWS, a PDF-based rendering system, some 10 years or so ahead of OS X. It was beautiful, but slow.

Give it time, even as an iOS programmer, in my opinion I'd think that HTML/CSS/JS is long-term, the better way to go, simply because it's open.

Let's hope openness wins in the end.
Direct link to the paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.3670v1
sounds like that would be unlawful here on several levels
Uber’s Surcharges Demonstrate The Harsh Reality Of Dynamic Pricing
I don't disagree, but a few points spring to mind. And in my earlier post, I wasn't really thinking about 'scaling', but new functionality/features.

Occasionally "immediately" really does mean "in the next 5 minutes". Oftentimes it actually means more on the order of days or a couple weeks. "Scaling" can mean different things, and anything beyond "scaling" web requests alone will likely mean a shift in business operations that can't/won't happen overnight either.

In most situations where I've been in where people request something, but the rest of the business unit really isn't ready to handle the change. "We need the new data reports now" but when you make the change you realize the other company who pulls the data to process it is on vacation and won't be back for two weeks, and if you make the change now, then it'll break everything.
Yes, if you scroll using a 'pixel scroll' where it jumps down a few pixels per frame it looks great but if it jumps down 20+ pixels like with any normal scroll wheel, arrow keys, page up/down keys, or arrow buttons it just looks stupid.
...some say.

Title fix?