skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if it's apathy, so much as it's lack of awareness. People are simply ignorant of how the things they say and post on Facebook can come back to haunt them, and when, and with whom, and in which settings. It's a safe bet to assume that most Facebook users simply don't know how Facebook data works, or what its ramifications could be.

They won't know, or care, until they run into a specific case where it affects them -- at which point, chances are, it will have taken them entirely by surprise. (It takes only one off-handed reference to a drunken Facebook photo in a job interview, for instance, to put the fear of God into many users).

I'm not suggesting that people would abandon Facebook en masse if they were better informed about it. And hell, I'm not sure many people even would care all that much. But I bet you'd see a marked shift in user behavior in pretty much any users in college or older. (Basically, anyone thinking about employment).
Vagrant 1.0 - Virtualized development for the masses.
I get the idea. Android Market is essentially Google's iTunes now, and they want to push the music/movies aspect. Google Play makes more sense than iTunes branding does (tunes are about 1/8 of what it does these days), but there is some weirdness. Play works well for music/movies/games, but not really for apps/books. I was introduced to the brand with an update to Google Books app saying it was now Google Play Books, which made me think Google was expanding into sports team management or something.
Syntactic sugar (dynamic getter and setters using @synthesize, @property, allowing for dot syntax accessors) is not new. Nor is Garbage Collection. Garbage Collection is not available on iOS, but has been for a long time on OS X [edit: and as noted below, is actually being deprecated in favor of ARC]. Objective-c 2.0 came out in 2006. Blocks, at this point, are not really new either. So, I think it's incorrect to say that Apple is 'adding' these things.

If a newcomer checked out the online documentation for contentStretch they would find:

"Defines portions of the view as being stretchable. This behavior is typically used to implement buttons and other resizable views with sophisticated layout needs where redrawing the view every time would affect performance."

There's also a lot of good arguments as to why dot syntax is often NOT what you want to do.

For instance, a someCALayer.frame will give you the frame of that layer based on its anchor point, position and bounds. However, you can't do myLayer.frame = someRect [edit: as pointed out below, you can do this -- but the results may not be what you expect].

The introduction of the 'simpler' dot syntax, in that example actually makes things harder for a new programmer.

So, I don't agree that syntax is why Objective-C is hard. Intimidating because of syntax, perhaps. But, once someone begins coding (IMHO) it can be one of the easiest languages.

My school taught Pascal in the intro to comp sci class. I found it incredibly difficult (well, maybe dull is a better word). I then self-taught myself actionScript (late 1990's). I then self-taught myself Objective-C, and I have to say it really just took a Big Nerd Ranch guide and I was off and running. It takes years to become fluent, but I really think that when someone grasps the basics of Objective-C, over time it is one of the most intuitive languages.
And this one:

Git may be disadvantaged more than other systems because single files are not tracked

Though I get what they are trying to tell here ( I know git to an extent), a newbie will definitely be lead down the wrong path with this line. I am doubting this entire thing has any magic at all.
We purchased the domain from the previous owner a few months ago. We wanted to use it to launch the new Basecamp since the Classic version used basecamphq.com. We wanted to keep the URLs separate so this seemed as good a time as any to make it happen.
Introducing Metriks: A new metrics and instrumentation library for ruby
Sounds too good to be true, and it is. I tried this exact same setup and the noise the new MBP (was a 15" model) make when not even under full load is nothing i wanted to experience all day. It also got really hot in the upper keyboard area.. I those issues werent there, it would indeed be perfect.
The animation on this page renders very poorly for me (Chrome, OS X)

https://play.google.com/about/
He was also one of the key Congressmen fighting against SOPA. I think Issa is generally a good guy, who just like any other politician (except Ron Paul) can be swayed by lobby money to support a certain bill that in the end the public might not like.

It's not that different than Al. Franken supporting net neutrality, only to become a strong supporter of PIPA later on. Although, I'm not sure Al Franken ever was a good guy. Perhaps he was just generally for more Government control of the Internet - which I guess net neutrality could be part of that.

Either way, the core problem still seems to be how campaign financing works right now, getting politicians desperate for campaign money, and ending up supporting bills that may or may not be compatible with their own ideals.
This may work for you now, and I stand my ground the same way, the reason this is so alarming is because eventually, EVERY employer may ask this and then you simply won't have a choice.

I am curious, however, what will happen to people who really don't have a facebook. I've never had an account, would they believe me or assume I deleted it?
Besides a lot of profiling of our code, its amazing how many people dont ever do this...we rely heavily on micros in production.

A lot of people will tell you using micros in production is a bad idea, and dont get me wrong...for most people it is a bad idea. Our findings are that micros are reliable and if you use them correctly you are going to be OK.

Where we used to have 2 smalls, we can afford around 8 micros before the cost becomes an issue. This is a significant benefit in that it increases our availability (Basically we're in each region and every availability zone). We have two main systems, the web frontend and our monitoring nodes. Nodes exist in a specific region, and report back to the central storage system via API.

The main feature of our platform which enables us to scale using such small systems is that our CPU demand is very predictable. There are no "hourly jobs" or anything that would spike CPU, everything is done throughout the hour and if we need more work to get done, we simply add more servers.

We are going to do a big write up on this in a few weeks, check our blog (http://www.verelo.com/blog) or HN for the post when it comes out.
You can pretty easily add a print page and point the search engines to that. They use this for JsDuck - https://github.com/senchalabs/jsduck
I don't think Objective-C is hard at all.
If you understand OO or come from a OO language you can pick it up pretty fast, like in a day or two.

Cocoa on the other hand requires much more learning curve. Also apple could improve their documentation.

I'm currently working on a OSX app, and Objective-C has been a breeze, with the new ARC is even more easy to work with.
The idea is that code is written once but read many times. Objective-C's verbose naming make you work a little more when writing it (though a good programmer's editor or IDE like Xcode or AppCode greatly eases this) but it pays off each time you need to read the code, especially code you're not familiar with.

With it's C-based syntax, Objective-C isn't as clean as Python or Ruby, but due to the explicit naming conventions, I think it's more readable than Java or JavaScript.
GC is deprecated as of 10.8, in favor of ARC.
That's exactly what happened. It was actually confusing for people since different people on the same project were referring to Basecamp with different names. That's one of the reasons we migrated everyone to basecamphq.com and now, basecamp.com on the new accounts.
Dwolla Being Sued by Bitcoiners for $2 Million
This article does not mention it at all, but Bodog.com was accepting online payments from residents of Maryland. That is how a MD state court was able to establish jurisdiction. Once that was done, they were able to take action against Verisign, a U.S.-based company.
Facebook would be putting short-term revenue over not just user happiness, but user career prospects. Selling user data in a way that can cause direct harm to users seems several unforgivable steps beyond any privacy violations we've seen from Facebook thus far. But maybe I'm naive/old-fashioned.
So long, djangosnippets, and thanks for all the fish
Thanks. To be honest, we didn't think much about SEO here at all. We thought about customers. Well written pages that speak clearly and explain products thoroughly are automatically good for SEO. SEO gains are side effects of good writing.
No, that's the beauty of the thing -- if you can call a shitstorm on net freedom beautiful.

Usually when the legislative and executive branches get crossed up, the courts sort it out. But in this case Congress (the Senate) already ceded these powers to the executive branch under some other treaties. So there's really nothing to sort out. Congress (the House of Representatives and Issa) could make a big fuss and cause the administration not to implement ACTA, but it'd just be a temporary measure. You'd have to have a law passed specifically restricting the Executive branch from interfering with internet rights via previously existing treaties in order to really fix this thing. A long shot at best. You'd probably have more luck trying to teach beavers to fly airplanes than actually straighten out this situation "correctly."

Internet freedom, including privacy, anonymity, access, and publishing rights, are in desperate need of a constitutional amendment. Nothing else is going to work. There's simply too many structural avenues for attack by vested corporate interests.
From ReleaseNotes.rtf

Known issues
-Some commands are not yet supported on Windows, namely: git archimport, git cvsexportcommit, git cvsimport, git cvsserver, git instaweb, git shell.
-git and bash have serious problems with non-ASCII file names (Issue 80, 159)

There are other known issues, but I think those are the most important.
> The few who responded seemed to dislike it, not for any particular technical objection to the language or its features, but simply to its existence at all, which surprised me.

It seems that the author is surprised by rational human behavior. A new language introduces a tradeoff between having a new tool that may better solve your problems, and introducing fragmentation where the developer must invest time learning a new language and tooling or the developer faces a smaller body of code that he can work on.

I like and use CS, but the author's philosophy that more languages in use always better for everyone, is fundamentally flawed.
Yup - the L-type visas are a non-starter.

But if your lawyer was so experienced, shouldn't you have been forwarned that you had a marginal case?

Did the UCSIS outright deny the application (which is a problem for the future too) or just ask for further documentation (which could be death by a thousand cuts too)?
I think it's very largely a question of what you're used to. I don't know much about Objective C, but given my knowledge of Smalltalk, the use of keywords to identify arguments seems entirely natural.

But then I've never really understood why people think it's acceptable for languages to insist that you do this:

myfunction("First argument","Does this one really go second?","Is there even a third?")
> This may work for you now, and I stand my ground the same way, the reason this is so alarming is because eventually, EVERY employer may ask this and then you simply won't have a choice.

At that point I delete my Facebook account and never look back.
Just to be clear, I was referencing the point in the original article where it said that apple was 'adding Garbage Collection' to make the 'code expressed in Objective-C simpler'.
Ivy Bridge should help. I'm mid-2010 MBP here so I can't even use my Thunderbolt display yet.
Selectors always describe exactly what the method does and what it needs. For example, stringByAppendingStringWithFormat: says "You will get a new string, by appending a format string to the receiver." There is also the mutable counterpart, appendStringWithFormat:, which is shorter because it doesn't return a new string, instead, appending directly to the receiver.

Verbose selectors make Objective-C self-documenting at the cost of extra typing. But autocomplete solves this problem because you only ever have to type 2-5 characters to insert the method you want (once you are experienced enough to predict what autocomplete will spit out).

Objective-C naming conventions form predictable patterns. Inexperienced programmers gripe because they have yet to figure out these patterns, good programmers love Objective-C because they understand these patterns and can therefore predict the name of a method and its arguments and great programmers write their own classes that use these patterns.
What Google Play means for Android developers
Upvoted but I'm not so sure about your number 1. I always thought that you need to have a US bank account (hence US citizenship) to incorporate the company in Delaware. How would you achieve that as a non-US citizen?
For those looking for more information:

Problems with ACTA, from Michael Geist, a Canadian on the EFF advisory board:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6350/125/

From his points, the main substantive change from what I can tell is more oversight and liability for 3rd parties, with one likely target being ISPs:
"Within ACTA, Articles 8 and 12 apply in the civil enforcement context, Articles 23 and 24 add “aiding and abetting” to criminal offences, and Article 27 targets third parties in the online environment. "

A defense of ACTA from the European Commission:
http://ec.europa.eu/trade/tackling-unfair-trade/acta/index_e...

Defense summarized here:
http://venturevillage.eu/acta-myths-explained

All in all it seems like a pretty vague agreement designed to bring all the signers on the same page in terms of oversight and investigation of ip importing and exporting activities. It hardly says that countries must do anything, but that they "may" do many things they agree on. That's not to say that the agreement would be a good thing in its current form. Agreeing to potentially criminalize activities without mandating protections from false charges etc seems like a poor decision to me.
SF NLP class learning group
If you are around SF and taking the NLP class online, lets form a group that meets once a week (preferably on the weekend) to discuss the lectures and the assignments. My email is sudarshan AT acm dot org.
I expect legislative action on this if it becomes too popular.

Legislation Facebook should back if they have an ounce of brains.
I have a question:

How might accepting a US citizen co-founder impact such a visa process? Does ti improve the the chances for success and if so why?
Yeah, but give me a language (e.g. - Perl, etc) that lets me make closures, instead of anonymous inner classes that implement an interface with exactly one method, any day. Fascist OOP can lead to some real code bloat, and I suspect that is starting to dawn on the leadership of this industry.

A bit tangential, but it's something I am reminded of day in and out trudging through Java code at work, and one of the "quick payback" reasons I'd like any new guy to understand FP.

(oh, and Python and JavaScript are, at least in a "compatible style", functional programming languages)
It looks like a carbon copy of Apple App store / iTunes.
Fixing *nix filneame
chomp chomp chomp
Eh, I think that's a little overbroad. The way it works is, methods whose purpose is returning something are named for what they return, while methods whose purpose is creating a side effect are named for what they do. So NSString has `stringByAppendingString:` because you're asking for a new string, while NSMutableString has `appendString:`, which is essentially the same as it would be in Ruby except with an allowance for Objective-C's static type system.

What really creates the impression that Objective-C speaks in terms of nouns is that Cocoa tends to promote immutable objects more than Ruby does (e.g. the only way to get an immutable string or array in Ruby is to freeze a mutable one, while you'll almost never get a mutable array in Cocoa unless you create one yourself), so you probably do spend more time asking your objects for other objects than you do in Ruby.

Although the verbosity can get overwhelming, I actually like this about Objective-C. In terser dynamic languages, I'm constantly having to confirm (either mentally or in the docs) which methods mutate and which return a new object. Cocoa's naming conventions mean I pretty much never have to do that.
If you are interested in joining a learning group in SF around this class please see here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3672184
If you're going in for an interview and now this is a requirement, why don't you just deactivate your account and tell them that.

Then, if you get the job (although I don't think I'd want to work at a place that's looking over my shoulder constantly), you can reactivate it whenever you want.
That's one of the things I'm finding most annoying about learning Obj-C. The weird thing is that these extra long names make the language less readable to me, because I have to mentally diff very similar looking long strings.
I've found it pays off at write time too. Having to say something about each parameter when naming a method really helps me to stop and think about what I'm doing every time I add to an object's interface. I'd like to think it ultimately leads to less bloat.
Lots of my posts never get through the spam filter, yet I think they are programming related.

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/16399069781/googl... for example

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13264962223/sum-o... and http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13265364121/popen... are two others that I would like to share wider

I don't think they ever got through :(

(I've lost track of what I've tried to send through now; I tend to delete to tidy up when it fails)

Generally, the memory of proggit I have is warm and fuzzy and old. Naturally my memory is selective; but I remember it being far more like HN is now.

The comments were less brogrammer frat'ish. Now, they swin further and further daily towards the immature brat'ish frat'ish sadly.

Insightful comments are fewer and further between.

Maybe proggit needs a restart? The /r/republicofatheism -type reboot is all you can do on reddit because its not self-organising ;)

I lament the passing of the good old days.
Their new app badges[1] say "Get it on Google Play". It's not clear at all what platform you'll be getting it for. Most people know they have "an Android", not "something with Google Play". Bit of a step back.

[1] http://www.android.com/developers/branding.html#google_play
Per-Capita, the U.S. is a Century Ahead of China
Of course, I don't doubt that. We just don't use it for that, so for me it makes sense not to have it from my point of view.
Hm, it looks like market.android.com now also redirects to Google Play. Wasn't Android supposed to be a separate entity from Google?
Social media is becoming the main agent of a police state in a frightenly quick pace. I'm starting to think that the only reason these practices were not so common before was because of a technical barrier, and not because our rights were once valued.

Putting bugs in your phone and residence is difficult, requires technical expertise and people to actually monitor. So well, what can you do? Like the article says, the option was to educate. But then comes social media and kills the technical barrier, so great, lets spy on our students, candidates, etc, and have them give us clearence to do so through intimidation.

We never had those rights to begin with, spying was just more of a hassle then than it is now.

Now begins the real fight for those rights. If we fail, then we are left with a socialitariam-regime and forced to keep using some hypocritical-media in order to be able to get jobs/loans/etc while we keep private matters offline (until new technology breaks that barrier too).
I've had it both ways, hopping over the Atlantic a few times, working from both office, hotel, apartments and actual home plus the occasional conference or weekend at friends. Eternally grateful for my laptop back then, actually bought one a bit bigger than what the company had me use (and, well, a Mac instead of a Vaio).

Now, I'm a sessile work-at-home startup guy who's really happy with a Linux tower and several displays connected. I've gone so far as to miss the ubiquitous color beige of ages past.
Not all companies have an HR department, and those that do don't necessarily populate it with people who know code when they see it.

At my current job, I have six coworkers. At my previous one, I had three. What HR?
It's never gone though...

As soon as you apply for a job that is high level or sensitive enough, that information will be part of the dossier they review. Depending what is in your FB, or any other comment history you may have, it MIGHT be wise to keep that FB. Lest they think you were trying to hide something.
You get to choose, and can go for something between. Eg when I built my Linux box a year ago I used the lowest power Core i5, SSD, 8GB ram which is nearly silent, and uses 50W from memory at peak. Linux sleeps fine now.
> All this scrutiny is too much for Bradley Shear, a Washington D.C.-lawyer who says both schools and employers are violating the First Amendment with demands for access to otherwise private social media content.

> "I can't believe some people think it's OK to do this,” he said. “Maybe it's OK if you live in a totalitarian regime, but we still have a Constitution to protect us. It's not a far leap from reading people's Facebook posts to reading their email. ... As a society, where are we going to draw the line?"

Surely they are misquoting this lawyer, or did the First Amendment start applying to corporations all of a sudden?
I'd wager that someone who is highly skilled can afford to take several days off work.
Your comparison of fDate to DateTime is a good conversation starter. fDate was built precisely to provide such functionality as DateTime does, but it works in PHP 5.1. DateTime is only available in 5.1 if you explicitly enable it. fDate means you can use sane date handling on any version of PHP without worrying about what exact environment the code will be run on.

If you dig into Flourish for a bit, you'll find that Flourish is basically aimed at being a portable, secure base layer to build stuff on top of. It gives you a platform to work in PHP one layer above the PHP functions that are largely derived from C libraries. It includes stuff like UTF-8 string functions, input filtering, arbitrary precision math and whole bunch of other stuff that will work with any kind of (semi-popular) DB on any platform with any version of PHP 5.1+.

Because of this, it isn't going to use PSR-0, or namespaces, or other new language features in PHP 5.3+. However, due to the architecture, you can successfully use it with PHP 5.3 or 5.4 and use all of the new language features in your part of the code. However, when you need to actually send a standards-compliant email with an attachment including UTF-8 content and inline images in the HTML version, fEmail has your back. Oh, and it prevents email header injection along the way. :-)
I feel the same way, which makes me lucky that I opened a Spotify account when I did.
What an excellent utility Vagrant is. I've been using it a lot lately for working on Nagios and Ganglia configuration setup and tuning; so convenient to be able to build a base box with what I need and then fire up a little cluster in a minute or so.