skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article:
> Being non-standards-compliant in a way that privileges their flows relative to others seems more than a little hypocritical from a company that's making such a fuss about network neutrality.

That's completely off the mark. NN was a reaction to the plan by ISPs to throttle large sites (e.g. YouTube) that their own customers were requesting unless they were paid protection money. It later became a political thing, with people mostly deciding to support (or oppose) it based on party lines.

It has nothing to do with tuning one's network, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary. It was just an attempt to stop rent-seeking by greedy ISPs that has morphed politically after attracting lobbyist attention.
Morals aren’t just for when you decide that killing people is a bad idea.

I think it’s morally right to not jaywalk when there are children around. That’s even less harmless than downloading files, but it’s still a moral question.
Having this problem too. The thing that I'm worried about is that my site just keeps trying to load without any error message or 404 page appearing. Is there a way to get something to show up to inform users of the downtime?

(Or ideally, a way to point towards another instance of the site quickly. I'm worried the DNS wouldn't propagate fast enough)
Elo oddities: the tortoise and the hare
I wonder how many gigs of transfer one can shave by cutting a single character from the Google homepage?
One can get pretty close to the coca-cola formula using chemical analysis. i think it would be a good documentary show to do this in CSI miami style, and i bet funding wouldn't be that hard to get :)
For a true cola-rific experience check out:

A) Mexican Coca-Cola (sold in tall, skinny bottles: http://www.amazon.com/Mexican-Coca-Cola-Drink-12-Ounce/dp/B0...)
B) Kosher Coca-Cola (only available around Passover in select markets like NYC & Miami - look for the yellow cap on 2-liter bottles)

Both are made with real, honest-to-goodness sugar, not HFCS. They taste better and are a fun treat.

As a related note: There's a whole subculture of soda geeks (I presume you are as not-surprised as I was to discover this ;) and it's a fun mini-adventure to explore some of the things one can buy (i.e. vanilla coke w/ real sugar)

See: http://www.sodafinder.com/products/coca-cola-coke-vanilla
Yeah, respecting literal line breaks would break some things, but simply replacing the two spaces at the end of a line with something visible (maybe two underscores if that doesn't break something else) should work.
Indeed. They refute the claim in the post that search-and-replace was "the best [Smalltalk] could do". The author ought to have corrected his post, but instead just ignored this.
Pro Tip : Examples first
Toronto Set To Become The Centre For Global Finance
I think the issue is that there are good statically typed languages and there are bad statically typed languages but only the latter are popular.

I've done a good bit of programming in Java and that was painful, with relatively little benefit. In fact, for a pretty long time, Java made my an adherent of dynamic typing.

Then I tried Haskell and realized that a good static typing system is very useful. It not only catches mistakes--I've worked on very language interpreters in both Python and Haskell, and I constantly made preventable mistakes in Python--but actually makes your code more expressive. Take the read function, for example. (It is basically the opposite of toString.) I can't think of any way of writing it in a dynamically typed language because it has to know what type it's supposed to be to work--it's polymorphic on its return type. And this is very useful: if you have a string, you can just read it in and it will be of whatever type you need (as long as you've defined how its read).

Haskell has some other advantages over Java (e.g. much more lightweight types and no messing about with classes and subclasses), but I think the important point is that static typing done right is not only safer but also sometimes more expressive than dynamic typing.
Oops CERN Cries Wolf Speed of Light Not Broken; ‘Bad Connection’ Blamed
I use HATEOAS because I derive very specific benefits from the client/server decoupling it enables. I have used it to build a large business application.
I agree that far too many people talk about HATEOAS that have never really used it on real projects and that is unfortunate. However, I suggest you avoid throwing out the concept because the messengers are inadequ
Launching a Startup - You're Doing it Wrong
Get the book "Code complete", it has a large section dedicated to this problem.
Mine says:

Application Error
An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.
MoonSols Windows Memory Toolkit
In the parent's description, it doesn't sound like he ever gave the card back to the magician. He himself ripped the card, then immediately keeping the pieces tight in his fist.
I try to watch this video about once a month. It never ceases to relevant to my life and work, I just wish I had seen it ten years ago when I was first starting.

Thanks for the reminder this month!
I've recently been jumping around in my naming conventions. I'm a student and haven't quite settled in one one particular convention. For the current project I'm working on (C++) I've been using function overloading. So for example, I have a class called BankAccount. I have a private and a public method that will set the balance or return the balance (set is private, get is public) of the account, I've overloaded this so that if no parameter is passed it returns the balance, and if a parameter is passed it will set the balance accordingly. I use this in my deposit and withdrawal methods. I do the same thing for other setters/getters. I picked up this convention from seeing it used in other languages like Ruby and Javascript.

Is this a bad practice? It seems logical to me, but I'm wonder what other peoples thoughts are and if it may be confusing to someone else.
I downvoted because the parent misread the article and as a consequence is taking a strong stand from a misinformed starting point. The discussion that results will not likely be very interesting.
Vision and principles is a good method. This is a great talk about that https://vimeo.com/36579366

Covers the inventions at Xerox PARC, how they were motivated by removing modes. Then how Brett Victor of Kill Math http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ fame comes up with his ideas. They all stem from a single unifying principle.

First world problems though and no concern with markets and customer validation.
This is called "modem math".
Yes, this is for society, not necessarily for parents. If I were an employer who had a lot of low-wage/SES parents, I'd seriously consider some kind of education program for their children. It's a great way to reduce turnover, too, since they won't want to take their kids out of the program for a 10% raise somewhere else.
Puzzles 9 and 12 assume sizeof(int) is 2. It's poor form for a language lawyering quiz to make an assumption about implementation-dependent behavior. It's especially poor form when the assumption made is long outdated and likely to surprise--I suppose it's still true for C compilers targeting 8-bit and 16-bit microcontrollers.

Aside: I remember buying the first Programmer's Heaven CD-ROM boxed set at The Party back in the mid-nineties. It was an incredibly valuable resource for me in those days. The best source of programming information was through the dial-up BBS scene, but none of the boards I frequented had a collection on the scale of Programmer's Heaven.
These are pretty much the reason that Go exists.
Sharemouse also include Drag & Drop of files between Mac and Windows:
http://www.keyboard-and-mouse-sharing.com/demo.htm
5 Backlink Methods For Your Internet Business
JavaScript with "use strict"--which is basically the modern version of JavaScript, but has to be enabled explicitly because of backwards compatibility--also warns you about assigning a variable that hasn't been declared. Just shows that JavaScript really was influenced by Scheme :).
Even at the peak, the total Neanderthal population was not that great. Much smaller than human hunter-gatherer densities.
I don't recommend this over the version that's been on YouTube for a long time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI23U7U2aUY

The kinetic typography gives me a headache, possibly because nobody should be forced to read text that is jiggling around at Ira Glass's speaking speed. It is also redundant, obviously. Ira Glass is one of the world's most famous narrators; we can understand him just fine.

It's also necessarily abridged, and while I agree that they captured some of the best sentences in the clip, there's more to a work of art than just its topic sentence. (Woody Allen: "I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.") In this case, it's a shame to leave out the part where Glass pulls out a tape of his younger self to show how awful his work used to be.
Been there too... I call it a 26/27 hour clock. On the day that would end with a sunrise, I'd take it off, but stay up, taking it easy (but tired) and push through until a "normal" bedtime, sleep like a baby and wake up the next day with a reset schedule.
Yet another reminder that well services like heroku are great, its up to you to make sure you have the appropriate redundancy in place to make sure your critical app doesn't go down. If you host anything critical on heroku, you _need_ a backup server elsewhere (not ec2!)
Nope, nothing to do with REST.
But doesn't that defeat the whole point of Heroku? If your app is running redundantly elsewhere, that means that you've already done all the work to set up the stuff that Heroku normally provides. And if you've already done that work, why use Heroku at all?
Heroku should know better and not host their status page on their servers since it becomes unaccessible when most needed. This problem started last night and they detected it this morning, monitoring system FAIL.
It's hard to agree with this as vigorously as I want. Every year I look back at where I was the year before and realize I was terrible back then, and when I look back at today in twelve months I'll realize that what I'm working on right now is not nearly as good as it will be then.

To anyone frustrated with their own mediocre work, keep going! You will be so much better next year.
The Clojure ethos is quite anti-encapsulation. Generally, you maintain complex invariants by defining the functions that manage your data and not updating it except through them. (This is easier than it sounds, because when all data structures are immutable, drive-by-mutation just doesn't happen.)
Just out of interest sake what are people doing as a backup to heroku, and is failover automatic or do you have to make DNS changes?
If you did not intend to be bound, why did you bother to write it?
Excellent point. I don't think they realize how much actions like this erode people's trust.
For some ideas, have a look at:

http://www.paulgraham.com/seesv.html

http://scobleizer.com/2010/10/04/silicon-valley-places-that-...

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/things-to-do-and-eat-in-silico...
The Perfect Wedding Reception
It’s winter, which means that many people have begun to plan summer weddings, and what better way to enjoy such an event than outside. Of course, there are still elements to contend with, though luckily there are ways to deal with them. One way is chair slipcovers. These are stylish, elegant covers that go over the backs of chairs to protect them from moisture.
This is true. Heroku needs to be redundant. This shouldn't happen on Heroku.
I assume you mean it's available at those neighborhood retailer pharmacies (CVS, Walgreens?) and with a prescription? Could you explain more?
Article too long? Didn't quite read it all?

"Bonus fact: Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a heavily guarded mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” In early 2011, This American Life broadcast an episode[1] discussing a potential early recipe for the drink, but almost certainly not the one in use today. Coke denied[2] that the program had discovered the true formula. In that episode, Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, an unauthorized history of the company (and beverage), told This American Life[3] that “only two people know how to mix the 7x flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”"

1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/427/o...

2. http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/02/16/bubbly-buzz-coca-cola-sa...

3. http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/02/15/is-this-the-real-thing-c...
DNS changes does not provides high availability at all. Even with a ttl of 60 seconds, if a cache decides to overwrite your TTL, you're screwed.

Real high availability comes with a price: redundant datacenter with BGP failover.
From question 9:

"What is the output of this program on an implementation where int occupies 2 bytes?"

Question 12 is a function pointer question and doesn't say anything about ints at all.

I'll assume you meant Question 14:

"What is the output of this program on an implementation where int and all pointer types occupy 2 bytes?"

If you read the question you would have noticed that the assumption was put in writing so that even if you first assumed int was 4 bytes, or pointers were 4 bytes you would still be able to find the answer correctly.
> How can it be a public disservice to fund this stuff if it's never possible to know if it's unwanted?

Because the funding comes from people who pay it under threat of force. Therefore, "not provably unwanted" shouldn't be the bar.
http://www.paulgraham.com/seesv.html
ActiveState's Komodo has autocomplete for some dynamic languages like Python. Obviously its not possible to be as accurate as static type languages, but it helps a lot.
Ah, I had clicked through to the original article which does not contain those caveats.

Yes, I meant question 14, not 12.
When heroku goes down. 1M+ apps go down.
I think using Unicode is fine if your language guarantees support for it. (E.g. it is in the language standard.)

Ultimately, something like τ -> τ' is much more readable than tau -> tau' and is about as easy to type in a decent text editor (e.g. \tau -> \tau'). This is especially true for heavily mathematical code.
I never liked the O'Reilly approach. At one point I had read 20 of their books and never felt like I learned anything. Some people can learn from references, but I really prefer Zed's "hard way" method which feels a lot like the Programmed Learning methodlogy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_learning).
If you don't want to pay nearly double the cost of the product just to ship Mexican coke via Amazon, try your local Mexican grocery store. The one down the street from me in Chicago (at Ashland & Beach) sells cases of 24 bottles for $24.81 including tax.
It appears to be hosted on rackspace (right now at least). But it doesn't look automatic so perhaps the people were not available to update it til this morning.
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These are not the problem with C. Things like a lack of support for functional programming constructs and more powerful manipulation of structs (e.g. iterating over fields and inspecting variable types) would be much more improvement to C than minor cosmetic changes that would hide the details that this quiz asks about.
The magic industry is like a monument to the shortcuts taken by our mental apparatus of perception.
I live alone (for 15 months so far) and love it and will never live with someone else again (well, until my attitude changes) but one thing I also do is work from home... I often go up to 7 days without seeing another human being and when I do it's either a McDonalds server or a pizza delivery guy, this part is turning me insane.

I have absolute control over my environment, if I don't like a noise or the heat or a smell I fix it, this isn't the reality most people have so when my financial/employment situation changes I will have to adjust very rabidly, with that in mind I've made the decision to move into an environment less desirable than the one I have now (working from an office) but I think it's for the best. At least I'll have a 2 bedroom apartment to myself to hide in at weekends if it is terrible.

Living alone is wonderful and I always find it strange how people can live with others, I can understand the desire people have for human interaction but being able to wake up and then go to bed without having seen another person in the waking period is just so great, true freedom. Maybe it just comes down to control.
Download IOBit Game Booster v3.3 Portable | Andra Little Notes
Maybe I'm not reading rfc3390 right? This:

"This increased initial window is optional: a TCP MAY start with a larger initial window."

And specifically this:
"MAY start with a larger initial window". "larger" than what?

a.) larger than that proposed?

or

b.) larger than was standard before this proposal?
Is there any reason to use sysctl over "echo > /proc" or is it just a matter of taste?
That comment is made from sour grapes.

If some bits of Heroku seem to be up, but not others, it could be because those bits are running older versions of the infrastructure. Or are being used as test beds for newer versions of the infrastructure. Or are deliberately running on a separate platform so that, when the main Heroku infrastructure starts having problems, other bits of Heroku's domain are still around to dispense advice on how to work around those problems.

(The most extreme example is a company's "status" subdomain, which ideally should be hosted on a completely different server, in a completely different datacenter, on a different continent located on a distant planet with different DNS regulations.)
I work on a team of about 10 people with Python on a pretty complex project. We have not experienced any typing issues in deployed code. I think this can be attributed to a combination of strong unit tests and type enforcement when constructing objects that are eventually serialized to the database. Python is stronger than some other dynamic languages at type enforcement too.

I believe I would prefer compile time type checking, but when working with a lot of dynamic data structures (say, JSON or XML) there is an ease that dynamic language toolkits can bring that a lot of the time evade more formal languages.
Card Trick Leaves Penn and Teller Puzzled
From this page, to directly answer the question:

What substances or ingredients can be listed as "natural flavor," "flavor," or "flavorings" rather than by a specific common or usual name?

Spices (e.g., black pepper, basil, and ginger), spice extracts, essential oils, oleoresins, onion powder, garlic powder, celery powder, onion juice, and garlic juice are all ingredients that may be declared on labeling as "natural flavor," "flavor," or "flavoring." Spices, oleoresins, essential oils, and spice extracts are listed in the Food and Drug Administration regulations.

Can the terms "dried meat or poultry stocks," "dried broth," "meat extracts," and "dried beef plasma" be listed on meat and poultry labels as "natural flavorings"?

No. Substances derived from animal sources must be identified as to the species of origin on the label and be consistent with the definition established by Federal regulation. For example, the listing on the label would read "dried chicken stock," "lamb extract," or "dried beef plasma."

So, to the original question: vegetarians can rest comfortably knowing that "natural flavors" don't contain meat.
An easy way to do this is to have the folded card in your right hand (palmed), you place the ripped pieces in the same hand, but hold them with your fingers. You look like your folding the pieces up, then make the switch as you place it in his hand, fold it up and tell him to hold it tight.

Of course this is done in one fluid motion, so he doesn't see the slight of hand switch - like the guy does at the very end of the video.
Why the CxO CIO meeting events are a swindle
I agree but we'll need to know more about caused this, hopefully they'll be a little more transparent than usual given the severity of this failure. In the meantime I have a new startup idea: Heroku failover cloud hosting.
Edit: I was wrong - see cygx's reply

---

I'm a bit rusty on the C spec, but I think the author is wrong about #4.

The answer refers to an exception for a pointer that points one past the end of an array.

And &a[5] would be valid based on that rule, because it points one past the end of the array a.

However (&a + 1) is not valid. It does not point one past the end of an array (because although a is an array, it is not an element of an array.)

Having said that I would be surprised if any compiler gave a result other than "2 5". Still, it's technically undefined.
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I dislike Pepsi, prefer Coke, most likely because I grew up outside the US and in the rest of the world Coke is sharper than in the US while Pepsi is sweeter. Even so, I've converted to Pepsi Throwback for the real sugar taste instead of Coke's nasty tasting HFCS formula here.

Sugar vs HFCS Coke and Pepsi smackdown: http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2011/11/soda-the-pepsi-throwba...
Something I started doing a while ago that was surprisingly helpful was naming arguments to methods or functions like so ... params_durations or params_user etc.

This helps when I'm scanning code, to quickly to know whether a variable was passed in vs being local, global or part of a class.

In Rails/Ruby programming I will also usually just write self.this_method where most people would just write this_method, because I instantly know where to look for that particular method (since a method definition could be in so many different places in rails).

Works really well for me but YMMV.
Cocaine hydrochloride IS cocaine, the fine white powder drug. It is distinct from free base cocaine, commonly known as 'crack', which is made by stripping the hydrochloride ion using a strong alkali. Crack is popular because the free base form is more pharmacologically active, meaning you get more bang for the same price, or alternatively, the same bang for a lower price.
Choice is not freedom.

That's a great aphorism.
Use a code "Cheap" for first month for $1.
"In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration"

The article makes it seem as though Coca-Cola has an exclusive arrangement that involves funneling leaves through a chemicals company. It doesn't mention anything about Stepan being the only chemical company that can process the leaves for other reasons.
What?! That's not the Google I know...
I'm in the opposite boat. Grew up with lots of siblings, had roommates all through college, got married young.

Believe me, even a few hours of solitude are things to be treasured. I wouldn't give up the life I have now for anything, but in my "grass is greener" moments, that's what I wish for the most. Long stretches of time in which to do my own thing entirely unpreturbed.
Ask HN: Review my startup, skrittle.com
I am looking for honest feedback on everything from the look of the site, to the videos, if you like / don't like the idea, etc. Thanks for your help
Ben Hall ben@skrittle.com
There is a huge difference between a permit and an agreement with the DEA.
I wonder if there's cola that is still made with active coca ingredients somewhere in the world. I believe chewing on coca leaves is legal in some parts of South America and cocaine is legal in some european countries... with the recent "boutique soda" craze, it must exist.

edit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/14/coca-colla-real-...