skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the gist, yes there is some code that is really really ugly and almost incomprehensible at times (I'm looking at you Perl jk) but on the more granular level of "not ugly" code I feel like beauty is somewhat in the eye of the beholder.

One thing I get very tired of is people pushing their stylistic choices as the beacon of good code. I think its hard for us to at times be accepting of code that is not in our style because it can require a bit of an adjustment to comprehend it. I've seen so many tiffs over seemingly meaningless things like placement of curly brackets its absurd.

The example code in the article does have some stylistic things you could nitpick on and could be pointed out in a code review but if that sets off your alarm bells I would highly advise that you don't work at a place that does heavy outsourcing if you want to maintain your sanity.
Research ethics: Zero tolerance
Probably found some book or magazine about programming in some cruise ship...
I cannot understand what this technology is supposed to do. What does it mean for a cell to expand or shrink? Or follow a customer? Why not just have all cells "expand" to maximum at all times? Power-savings? Interference?

Also, as jka points out,

> the OP is a principal at Genesis Partners, who funded the startup behind this technology...May still be valuable tech, but the title seems a bit disingenuous without the poster's disclosure.
Sure, with a cooperative judge. Which is why this made-up problem of judicial activism is such a huge threat to democracy. As a highly distributed system, the judiciary is the hardest thing for corporate interests to corrupt.
Suspicious was the wrong word. It reads to me like a lot of agreeing with SOPA opposition: "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet."

But then tries to jam in:

"That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders"

No! The internet has no borders. American laws and "rights" don't apply outside of the United States. That's why the United States tortures people outside of the US. You can't say that US law applies to copying MP3s, but not torture.

That's why if you read between the lines, the response is not saying "We agree with you.", it's saying "I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time."
Exactly. And an important factor in readable code is whether flow control constructs can be easily followed.
In what way do the authors of this statement "not get it"?

This thread seems to be full of a depressing amount of cynicism, FUD, or outright lies aimed at the people responsible, but it seems to be one big ad hominem. I don't see a lot of comments even trying to address the substance of the statement.

I do see several posts dismissing the whole response as empty rhetoric that doesn't say anything, even though there are several measures they say quite plainly and unambiguously they won't support (and it is good that they won't). OK, we get it, some of you don't trust Obama/government/the US/whoever. If you start from the position that they're just generating emtpy waffle to appease the critics, you have immediately rendered any contribution you might make irrelevant, since you presuppose that nothing you say matters anyway.

I don't see a single post acknowledging that any realistic official position on this sort of issue must strike a balance between addressing genuine problems with piracy and addressing genuine technical/ethical concerns with the measures used to do so. In fact, that's my big problem with much of the opposition to proposed laws like this: it's all reactive and complaining about bad laws, but no-one is stepping up to propose a real solution that is more technically and ethically acceptable and still does something about the original problem. Shouting abuse from the cheap seats isn't going to advance the debate in any useful way.

Sadly, the level of debate here is more like Slashdot lite than anything constructive: information wants to be free, they wouldn't have bought it anyway so it's not a lost sale, artists aren't entitled to any income and should just give live performances, the big media companies are asking for it with their consumer-hostile policies, intellectual property isn't real property and copyright infringement isn't theft, yada yada. It's just rationalising breaking the law, and I would bet good money that most people doing so haven't got the slightest clue about how many people work in creative industries and the real economics of those industries, though I'd also bet that the same people are among the first to complain about the state of the economy as their taxes go up, unemployment rises, their investment/pension returns fall, and so on.

So, can we please try to have a constructive, balanced debate about this issue from now on? We have clearly reached a tipping point. There is potentially more public awareness and support for action from other businesses both large and small now than at any time in a generation. We can make a robust case that the whole system is broken and needs to be restored to some kind of sanity that can be accepted as reasonable by most people and enforced against the remainder, or we can continue to throw stones at the glass house and convince the political classes beyond any doubt that the lobbyists are the only sane people in the game.
> But Guantánamo is still in business,

You can't extoll the virtues of a distributed, decentralized government then sweep its implications under the rug when you want to criticize a particular person.
This Is Why You Don't Go to the Gym
"""Most software are outdated after a couple of years."""

You'd be surprised. Tons of code runs in production, even in the latest of shiny systems, that was written 10 and 20 and 30 years ago -- either in whole or in parts, refactored etc.

From 1986's NeXT OS that is now OS X Lion and iOS 5, to Bill Joy's TCP/IP, to Emacs.

And tons of enterprise/banking/financial/military systems use ancient code, even 70's COBOL...
Completely false dichotomy. There is a whole field of law studying extra-territorial application of domestic law in certain circumstances.
This was interesting to me just because its someone not in a technical field trying to navigate these waters. He is already taking the right steps with a lawyer but obviously didn't realize how hard it was going to be. He's been around for a long time and has finally achieved enough success to feel comfortable enough spending money on the lawyer to take something off his long term wish list.
Ah, I didn't realize that about needing customs clearance. I know that not all of your subscribers are in the US. I was just using the US as an example.

In that case, how about partnering with people in each country who live in large enough cities that they can acquire Japanese candy themselves (at the Japanese mall or whatever), and then ship to the subscribers in that country? As I think a few people have pointed out, the real benefit to a subscriber is if they live in a rural place with no access to Japanese candy.

Again, I have no idea if this would reduce your shipping costs in the end, but I'm curious if it would. I think that there are not a lot of people who both (a) don't have access to Japanese candy themselves, and (b) are willing to pay $24 a month for it (since high earners tend to live in larger cities).
In NY, counterfeit goods are often sold in the following way. You buy a bag that looks like a Hermes bag, but the label is blank. You get to choose your own monogram for it for $20 extra. I.e., you go to chinatown and pay a guy to write "Hermes" on an unlabeled bag. Such operations are often shut down by undercover cops.

Are you really going to argue that this is about misleading labels, when the customer deliberately chose the misleading label?

If it were about misleading labels, it would be legal to sell fake Levi's as long as you post a sign saying "Attn Customer: This is NOT real Levi's". It's not about misleading customers. It's about protecting the profits of status sellers.
Small stores were $100/month and there were more of those. We made $144/store/month on average.
Although Cory Doctorow is a professional fiction writer, he is also a journalist and writer. Just because he has written some scifi doesn't imply that he is some sort of pathological liar.
What surprised me most was discovering that Intel's upcoming Haswell microarchitecture may include Hardware Transactional Memory. That's pretty exciting!
Acer, Samsung, LG, ZTE and HTC all make Windows Phone 7 models. That's most of the big Android licensees right there (Motorola being one of the big holdouts in both royalties and WP7 phones). Obviously they aren't so pissed that they won't invest some cash in building WP7 kit.
>> Have you done Android development?

Yes I have and I find Eclipse is awesome for Android development.

>> Have you ever changed a file outside of Eclipse? That's where the unreliability comes in.

Yes, I always turn on Auto-refresh in the Workspace settings. Works great, it should be on by default in all new workspaces I think.
Ask HN: Internships - Opportunities and Questions
Dear HN, I am a British student studying in the UK and following experiences with both an IT Corporate and a startup, I am exploring potential opportunities for the summer ahead. As such I was hoping HN members could both answer a few key questions and also advise on and suggest internships and technology schemes around the world.

1) Can non-US Students undertake internships (join startups on a temporary basis) without a complicated visa application process? if no, do any firms offer experience to non-US Citizens helping with visa approval.

2) Outside the US, are there any other regions (excluding europe) with a number of startups which offer experience to Citizens of the UK/Europeans.

3) Apart from the Beckman Center for Internet & Society (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/7315), are there any other technology related academic programs for non-US Citizens around the world?

4) For UK and European-based firms who offer internships/experience - are they all pure-coding jobs? - (I am aware of job sites such as Enternships & WorkinStartups, but am interested just in case some firms are not aware of these sites but have opportunities available)

I appreciate this is quite an extensive collection of questions and whilst I am clearly interested in a personal capacity, I am also hoping to start a discussion for the many other HN members who happen to be studying around the world and equally are investigating options for the summer ahead. Ultimately any information about internships and technology experience opportunities for undergraduates is welcomed here.

Thanks
I installed it on Windows, but it complained about the wrong version of GNUPG and didn't run. (I have 2.something for Engigmail installed.) Is there a way to install both of those at the same time?
Here's Why Scoble And The The Pundits Are Wrong: Windows Phone Will Be A Success
> How much harm does counterfeit drugs do?

My dad works in public health, and counterfeit drugs do a lot of harm.

I think SOPA, etc, is bad, but I also think the reaction of the geek crowd has been monumentally ineffective. These laws are all ultimately drafted by policy wonks. They actually do have the statistics on the prevalence of counterfeit drugs if you take the time to do the research. You can't oppose bad laws by pretending the political process doesn't exist, by dismissing off-hand what other people consider to be legitimate grievances, especially without having studied the subject.
Well i don't think it's the product, it was the content, and in our case, all content is going to be about the product, so i think it's a non-issue in our case, these other url shortening sites are linking to content that could be deemed inappropriate in most countries...
How To Start Smart: The Five Things To Know When Approaching An Incubator
Incompetence is not "evil in the most absolute sense of the word". The recently passed century has given us glimpses into what evil may look like, and it does not resemble the current US administration.

I think injecting politics with heated emotion is often confusing and counterproductive.
Google names former VMware CEO to its board
>Politics isn't a compromise, it's a ratchet.

Doesn't do much to explain women's suffrage...
I think most companies have tons of legacy code that is stilly lying around and in production use. When I was at Dreamworks Animation, we were still using tools written back in the 1980s to create animated features; albeit we kept improving on it whenever it didn't fit the bill.
I don't know how to navigate the regulations to get a bulk amount of edible product into the US. Any ideas?
The difference between civil/criminal liability for copyright infringement depends on whether you knew you were infringing. In YouTube's case, I believe they used their huge volume and a notice/takedown process to protect themselves from intentional infringement liability.
The small pleasures of notebooks, bags, and knowing you're not alone
Notch to take down Minecraft and Mojang in SOPA protest
A common typo, it seems. But I'm a bit confused as to why this was submitted.
NDAA = National Defense Authorization Act. It's the legislation that's passed every year to basically keep the Department of Defense in existence.

This is, of course, why we really need a line-item veto amendment. Because Congress can basically make a provision "un-vetoable" by including it in some giant appropriations bill.
Obama Administration Comes Out Against SOPA, PIPA
Why I am an atheist and a naturalist, by Mark Jaquith
I'd like to try this, but not sure how to proceed with FDA. If you know anyone who has done this with food, I'd love to learn.
Elitist Singapore - "I go for the best, not 2nd tier crap."
I loved Windows Phone 7. It was very fast, smooth, the UI was terrific but as a user I have one qualm: The web browser is second-rate.

Windows, I know you're trying hard with the Trident Engine, but i just don't know why anymore. Why are you sinking money into Internet Explorer? Search Money? For god's sake then just switch over to webkit. You've made some amazing hardware acceleration changes etc with IE10, but if all of that was to be given to webkit and back to the community you would improve the entire internet. So why?
For those who aren't familiar with MC Frontalot, might I suggest you check out "It is Pitch Dark," his rap about Zork.

http://youtu.be/4nigRT2KmCE
All true. Additionally, I'd say newbie programmers are most sensative to code formatting issues. I know when I started, I was so distracted by different indentation schemes, I practically couldn't read the code. Hopefully, when you get more experienced, you can read varied formatting styles with less distraction.

Just a comment on tabs and spaces -- My editor is the only editor which will be used and it has tabs at 8 columns. I run a utility on my code converting all possible spaces to tabs. I invented a ASCII#31 for a hard space, to be used in strings.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\PARADISE.TXT

grateful Evening mild; then silent Night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of Morn, when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds; nor rising sun
On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers;
Nor grateful Evening mild; nor silent Night,
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon,
Or glittering star-light, without thee is sweet.
But wherefore all night long shine
It also lacks anything close to a significant sample size. His observations, and to be fair most of the response here, are purely anecdotal.
Not sure where you're getting your information, but it's almost entirely wrong. GISelle is the same tech as Penelope. It was renamed because there was a trademark issue. Polygon search has been implemented for some time, but was delayed for product reasons (it's actually live, just undocumented). Tag indexing was launched with SimpleGeo storage from day one. Indexing of all properties by default happened several months before the acquisition. Both features were developed by people who are still at the company.

The company was acquired because it has real, defensible technology. If you're going to talk shit, at least get your facts straight.
A friend of mine was visiting me in NYC from Norway and we were talking about Salmiakki Koskenkorva. It's the first thing that I've simply been completely unable to find here -- looked for it all over the city. Still need to get a bottle.
YouTube Video Marketing Results; 60 Days
Some Escher-like impossible figures.
What does 'silently take down' though mean? And note that he actually said 'minecraft.net' and not 'Minecraft'. Does this include the login servers, preventing anyone from playing, or just the public having web site?
I spoke to some guy in (I think) about 2003-2004 who was selling SEO services by taking existing sites, having them built on top of Mambo CMS which he'd outsource using elance for $2000-3000 and sell them back over $60,000 - he used some form on his site like "how much money do you think you'd make if your site came up around 1-2 vs where it is now?" and he'd price accordingly. He had very little IT skills if any. Part of his secret he was reluctant to give up: submitting to DMOZ.

He lived in Queensland and has probably retired there too long ago. Shifty bastard.
I should look into this and craft a nice email with useful media for them to use. What's been holding me back is that I don't really know exactly what to say in such an email to make it likely for them to feature it. It's true that one mention from Lifehacker for example could really change things completely.
Here's an idea to generate some revenue: Some people might love some specific candy you sent. Let people buy packs of that candy through you.
i can imagine that some online services are doing the same thing, or at least hoping for the same effect: users who pay a subscription fee but don't use it. of course, when they do, if they didn't expect it and can't afford to scale they go under.

anyone know how big the parallels are between the economic models used by gyms and many online services?
Is there any context to this or are you just pointing the humor of out how common this is?
In JavaScript, if you check for a non-existent property on a variable (e.g. aVar.lenght vs aVar.length) it will return "undefined". So people often rely on this behaviour to check if something is an array or not (no comment on whether this is good or bad), with:

if(somethingThatMightBeAnArray.length){
// do things with array
}

So misspelling of length can be making a lot of code out there behave in an unexpected way.
The dumbest attack on the Netflix "free ride" you have ever read
Thanks for posting this! I just updating my own silly shuffle module (https://github.com/substack/node-deck) to work using the last in-place algorithm for uniform shuffling and I saw a huge speedup.
Zynga Dealt Strong Hand in Gambling
> In what way do the authors of this statement "not get it"?

The times are changing. I'm not saying "they don't get it" as in "they're stupid, they don't know what they're talking about" (they certainly do, otherwise they wouldn't have received lobby money), I'm just saying that they cannot see that the whole world is changing, or if they do see that, they have the audacity to think that they can do something to stop it.

Anyway, as a guy living in Europe this whole SOPA thing reminds me of one of Marx's stories, about a English industrialist in the mid 1800s who had just set foot in Australia and who wanted to mimic the same capitalistic conditions there (children working 16 hours per day etc.) as he had done in native England. But much to his surprise, Australia being a new world with new rules and capitalism not being a universal or Platonic-like truth, he wasn't able to exploit people in Australia as he used to do in England.

And about "cynicism", I know I'm probably in the minority, but to my knowledge there's nothing wrong with thinking critically about the world surrounding you and not just thinking that there's some "ideal" to which all those around you would eagerly submit.
How's My Driving?: Mediocre Games
@bemmu maybe you should get in touch with the guys at Zerocater. Try emailing Andrew Badr, andrew@zerocater.com.
"We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values."

Wrong. We do this every single time we instruct a jury that the accused must be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, when we advise a drug dealer he needn't co-operate in his own prosecution. Our system explicitly agrees that the liberties it recognizes will be abused by some bad actors.

Failing on that principle, it fails on the less important ones. It doesn't support DNS filtering, but it doesn't reject it either. The implication is that it just might be okay if targeted with sufficient precision, and never mind the precedent set. Without recognizing the technical and civil rights principles that make DNS filtering unacceptable on principle, it goes on to place responsibility for piracy prevention on everyone -- "Washington needs to hear your best ideas".

In short, the statement accepts the MPAA's bottom line as an absolute requirement -- something must be done about piracy! -- without recognizing the tech community's as such. That, my friends, is how you lay the groundwork for a "compromise" in the eyes of well-meaning moderates who don't really understand the issue. If I were trying to set someone up as an unrealistic radical, I'd do so just like this.

Does the WH care about getting the fundamentals right in the eyes of those who really understand them? Or does it want to position those fundamentals as the excess demands of unreasonable people who just won't compromise constructively? A great deal could ride on the answer. And remember, the question is being put here by some White House staffer who doesn't seem to grasp the implications of the 5th Amendment.
Pet Peeve of mine with math: Fisher and Yates have come up with something interesting here, yes. But like most mathematical theorems named after someone, attaching their names to it doesn't help understanding of what it does at all.

I don't name my functions benmathes_foo().
Guest Mode has already been requested by many people:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=7472
I think the response to this letter represents everything that's wrong with the tech community's approach to SOPA, etc.

You can't pretend the political process doesn't exist. We live in a country of 300 million people, each other their own interests, and this is the ugly way they all get hashed out.

At it's core, the White House's response to this petition is both reasonable and an opportunity. Basically they say:
1) we don't want to shut down Google, reddit, etc
2) we can't ignore the grievances of copyright holders, and asks the internet community for help reconciling (1) and (2).

Some of the things facilitated through places like thepiratebay.org are completely illegal, and I don't think anyone is trying to justify those activities. What people are doing, rather, is creating this extreme dichotomy: either thepiratebay.org exists completely in its current form, or you have to censor the entire internet. That is not the dichotomy you want to create, because losing that battle would be of course disastrous.

Given the current climate, and the status of Google, Apple, et al as the only bright part of a dismal economy, the tech industry is uniquely positioned to help pass an extremely narrow law that does little more than give people the political ammo to tell the MPAA/RIAA "hey you already got what you want!" But that'll require a willingness to participate in the political process that I don't think these companies have.
Asking here because I'm sure many people will have the same question...

...how much does your service cost? There's no pricing info on the site :/

Thanks!