skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
She did the procedure. She got lucky and the patient wasn't hurt. Then she found a job in a hospital run by doctors instead of administrators.

I feel bad even telling this story, because my friend is a super ethical person and this is far from her proudest moment. But that's how these things go, right? You come to a moment where every practical consideration tells you to do the thing you don't believe in, and no one ever has to know, and it probably won't cause any harm this one time ... and you become someone you never wanted to be. It takes real strength and forethought to make the right call there in the moment.
To infinity ... and beyond!

Sorry, I couldn't resist. However, this synopsis is consistent with some of the comments in that thread and may be as good a tl;dr as any other.
Agree.

I'm reading this on an ipad, and in portrait mode this page https://play.google.com/about/features/ is unreadable because the text slides behind the pictures.

Apparently noone has thought about whether the site is even usable for someone with a horizontal screen resolution of less than 1024px - which in this age of mobile devices is probably a double digit percentage of users.
Nice. Why NYC?
The only critic allowed to officially voice concerns during the hearings last week was Canadian law professor Michael Geist. He provided a very good and detailed overview on the issues and dangers already foreseeable. When people applauding his speech at the end the chairman of the EU parliament workshop treated with throwing people out.

Video of his speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=gzieTzart5s
Transcript on his site: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6350/125/
The Dirty Little Secret of Programming
One surprising knock-on effect of this approach is a reduction in pointless design arguments. The ones that are rarely constructive, where people get offended and cling on to their own precious concepts.

I think the strategy described is elegant in its directness. It's just a simple inversion of people's natural tendencies -- the very ones that get people into pointless arguments.
> In Design school, we learned how to criticize without being jerks. We also learned to trust other people, and take criticism without being offended.

I want to design school also. One thing I noticed right away:
We were _taught_ those things, but a lot of people didn't _learn_ them. Even near the end of the program, many of my classmates couldn't handle well (or usually just ignored) the feedback they got in group critiques.

Mostly, it was a problem that solved itself. The people who learned to give and take criticism improved a lot more than those that didn't.
The ASP.NET WebAPI and its shortcomings
Article on what is currently lacking in the new ASP.NET WebAPI.
I want to refute your point with the mention of Stuxnet. Please correct me if I'm wrong but up until now there are no groups that have owned up to the virus. There's evidence and much speculation to point it towards Israel gov't but no definitive proof.

A lot of the content that surrounded Stuxnet also hints to further organizations existing behind the veil. There were at a minimum 3 0-day exploits present in the virus that would have to have been operated from behind the scenes. It is extremely unlikely that a single group was able to create such a virus without external resources.

In the end you don't need to issue press releases and the like. You need to get in, do your damage and get out. Let the damage reveal itself in time and its considered massively successful. Those fighting the Iran nuclear program did more while keeping their mouths shut than any loud group ever has.
Aside from the new logo, it looks pretty much identical to how the Android Market site has looked for well over a year.

It's also logical that it would resemble the Apple/iTunes store, since they both serve pretty much the same purpose but for different platforms. Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com both look substantially similar for example.
Might be interesting to try AAC or Ogg Vorbis & see if they're any better. In these days of ever increasing cheap portable storage carrying a bunch of flacs around isn't quite as nuts as it used to be of course.

(Cymbals seem to be a particular bugbear for mp3 encoding; cymbal-heavy tracks tend to suffer the most from obvious encoding artifacts once you know what to listen for.)
If you read the article, the leader was not a proper member of the FBI. He merely collaborated with them.
I have a keyboard with brown switches and while they are quieter than blue ones, saying they produce "no sound" is quite an exaggeration. They still have a nice clicky sound and are much louder than normal keys. I actually like this, but it is something to keep in mind.
Electromigration
On Keeping Busy and Staying Sane in Startups
Content-wise I imagine they'll be some crossover, but, so far at least, the execution of the Udacity classes has been better IMO.
IBM Watson heads to Wall Street
No honor among hackers?
There's a new-ish community at /r/keyboards on reddit for anyone interested in mechanical keyboards - and others.
Ask HN: how do you estimate your cloud costs?
We've recently launched http://www.ShopForCloud.com to help people get cost estimates for their deployments on the cloud. The idea is that you describe your system deployment and we produce cost reports so you can compare clouds or deployment options quickly.

Since HN has a big startup community around it, we'd like to ask you guys what you are currently using to get cost estimates? Excel spreadsheets? If so, would something like ShopForCloud.com simplify your job?
This won't work in practice. Any situation with many equally qualified people competing for a very small number of spots becomes what amounts to a beauty pageant. What I mean by "beauty pageant" is that since every candidate is so well-qualified, any superficial imperfection begins to be treated as a useful criteria for selection.

When all worthwhile criteria are equal, worthless criteria are used to decide.

"This guy swore in a facebook post, so lets go with the other guy."
Forget the fact that we're not even talking about methods, really, we're talking about messages (a distinction I'm not going to make) and you refer to selectors like the one above as performAction:withTwoParameters:. Most people don't care anymore.

Well, those people have fairly low expectations of themselves then. People say this bullshit about the supposedly strange Obj-C syntax, whereas the part that it's not C is basically 99% "Smalltalk in square brackets". Nobody complains that Smalltalk has a strange syntax, even small kids seem to use Squeak just fine.

[object performAction: param1 withTwoParameters: param2]

not that different to:

object.performAction(self, param1, withTwoParameters=param2)

in Python, or any language with named parameters. The syntactic differences are superficial. You don't even have to know about selectors and messages to understand the gist of what that invocation will do. "OMG, method parameters have a name" --well, big effin' deal.

Ever seen C++ (especially the recent standard)? Or the beast with 1000 features C# has become? Obj-C compared is leanness personified.

The ACTUAL source of complexity in programming in Objective-C is the huge Cocoa (et al) API. But a huge API, especially nicely documented as Cocoa is, and with such breadth and nice MVC design, is a GOOD THING.

This tightly-coupled codesign is unique to Objective-C. There are other languages that run on .Net, such as Iron Python. Lots of language use the JVM besides Java, like Clojure. Even Ruby and Rails are two distinct entities and projects. The only significant effort to use a different language with Cocoa/Cocoa Touch and the Objective-C runtime, Mac Ruby, was a project largely backed by Apple before they abandoned it.

Actually, there are several efforts besides MacRuby to use another language with the Objective-C runtime: Nu (Lisp like), F-script (Smalltalk like). But the main difference here is that the Objective-C runtime is a very simple runtime, not a full VM, so the comparison to CLR and Java is not that apt. For one, CLR was designed from the start to support multiple languages, and Java didn't have any major language targeting the VM until like 2004-5.

In general, not that good of an article...
See post for beta invites to the directCanvas SDK.
I am joining Indaba Music.
Robert Graham's notes on Sabu arrest
Facebook’s first desktop app for Windows gets its official launch today
SQL.js: SQLite Compiled to JavaScript via Emscripten
Anyone care to guess what's up with these crazy long URLs? For instance https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bithack.ap....

The ?t= part doesn't seem relevant to the document being shown as you get the same page without it.
Nah. Not hard. Different. People have a natural inclination to resist the new. My guess is that a competent programmer with OO experience should be comfortable with Objective-C within a week or two of study.
Why isn't apple sueing them? They're copying their ideas...
And if they do want it, there's probably a damn good reason anyways.

Given some of the silliness engaged by the government (e.g. placing a GPS tracker on a Muslim Redditor's car, supposedly because of a comment on Reddit), I don't think we can really take that statement as correct. :-)
You do get used to it. Because it's a superset of C, Objective-C has all the syntactic noise of C and some of its own. Ruby is certainly more compact, though with its Perl influence, you can write very cryptic Ruby code. You do pay a price in Objective-C in order to have C directly and immediately available.

FWIW, extracting nested expressions into local variables helps a lot with nested method calls.
Not looking for trouble here but writing an iPhone app should be no more difficult than creating a Keynote presentation, imho. If Apple is the leader in document development (Keynote, etc), why can't they do the same with writing apps. Look at what they've done with the complexities of video editing. Where is the consumer grade development app for iPhone?
SQL.js: SQLite in JavaScript
Matt Goffrey: What Is Inbound Marketing
Meet the Man Behind the Very First Camera Phone
ugh, I hope they stick with an overloaded "Google Play" (like the overloaded "iTunes") rather than specifying "google play books".

First, because everyone will be fine with that in a month and know that multiple types of media are in there and second, because it's only a short hop from there to "Windows Live Home Mobile Live" or "Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch"
Actually, according GINI coefficient (going by the World Bank numbers), China has about the same overall wealth inequality as the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ... and is actually on par with such relatively well functioning countries as Turkey and Singapore.

Of course this doesn't translate that well to on the ground conditions, and their top 10% and top 20% share are still very high, but probably not high enough to significantly impact growth. (Now if that cascades into political problems, that's a different matter...)

Almost all long-term economic planning is in the hands of relatively few government officials, but wealth appears to be reasonably well distributed for a country _at their stage of development_. It's certainly not all in the hands of a few thousand people, since the top 20% would be a few hundred million.
I really enjoy seeing these social media articles. I got in trouble with my employer for a post on a friends social media page that my employer found out about (a coworker was trying to get me fired, it turns out) and threatened me with firing. The post was unrelated to work, but they deemed it as reflecting poorly on the company.

learn the hard way I suppose? in any case, I still feel that social media sites are plagued by abuse by third parties.
Love it, but am I the only one looking for an "icon-phone"? Pretty please.
Apple’s ‘iPad mini’ may be even more mini than you thought
> wondering if people taking the course planning to apply any of it in their daily work

The company I work for is planning to create or buy in some kind of customer facing knowledge base app with support for NLP queries, which is a large part of the reason I registered.
They're known for distilling culture and values on clients. It's apart of their high value-added proposition i think. e.g. - best practices.
A clever hack of an everyday problem for a good cause.
Apple (and the universe itself) are due for a fall
This always comes up and I think everytime, if people knew they would care. Most people really do want to hide things, I promise. They probably even want to hide things from you, specifically; I promise. The problem is really just, as another user said, awareness.
Sorry, I am not a programmer. Sorry then you should not be writing code for me.
How Pinweel Uses Linux to Power Group Photo Sharing
How are major undersea cables laid in the ocean?
But I'm reaching the point thinking: it's 2012, I'm an application developer, why am I spending half my time debugging memory leaks and concurrency issues?

Because Objective-C targets everyday desktop apps and mobile apps. In that space, manual memory management still wins the day.

For example, in Windows and Linux DESKTOP those kind of apps are ALSO made in C++ or C.

Java and C# are for the web server and the CORPORATE desktop (in-house apps).

Not many major end user apps outside the enterprise are made with either. Not any famous, widely used ones, anyway. Azureus, maybe, and a few dozen more.
"...after years of using it I rarely have to check the documentation for function behavior (such as array_merge)."

This should not be something that takes years. I rarely have to check the documentation for similar Ruby functions after using it for only a couple months. After using PHP for 8 months straight, all day every day, I still had to look up almost every standard library function call - even if I thought I knew how it worked, I still had to check because the pervasive inconsistencies in the standard library ensured that I could never be confident in my guess.

(This is only the tip of the iceberg for why I don't like PHP and don't recommend people use it, for other reasons see: fatal errors vs. exceptions, the strange implementation of OOP (late static binding? isn't that an oxymoron?), and the numerous failing test cases / bugs that reveal themselves in every new release.)
What early-stage investors really want
I'm guessing it's a tracking string.

It's actually past the # in the URL so it's not being used by the server, rather it's probably being picked up and reported with Javascript.
The Market autoupdate mechanism is going to ensure that the Market icon spontaneously disappears on all devices running 2.2+ (with Google branding) in unison, much to the confusion of every single user who just knows "I press the 'Market' thing and I get games."
To me the hardest thing is the seemingly arbitrary CG functions in Quartz2D and why they're so interspersed throughout the code. If I'm writing within the UIKit most of the time, and then have to make my own UIView for some custom drawing, I have a hell of a time remembering how, and always have to reference my earlier code, which I usually find on StackOverflow or somewhere else.

Example, let's draw a line and an ellipse in drawRect:

CGContextRef ctx = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
//CGMove the point somewhere?
//CGLineTo something
//CGDrawEllipseInRect or something
//stroke or fill? CGFillSomething maybe?
//do i need to end the context?

Maybe it's a mental block on my part, but I can _never_ remember how to do this and always have to look it up, probably because it's not part of the standard UIKit and not used on daily basis. I guess I would just like to see the Quartz stuff conform more to UIKit naming conventions (but because it's based in C, I understand why it's not)
Your startup needs the design process (not necessarily a designer)
Troubleshooting responsive layout with :after
Note that he hasn't actually been sentenced to 124 years. We're talking about multiple stacking charges here. You could get multiple charges of parking too far from the curb and it could add up to thousands of dollars, but that doesn't mean the parking fine is too much.

More than likely, it'll be reduced to a sane amount when the compile the charges. 5 years, maybe 10 (maybe more). The actual sentence (minimum sentences notwithstanding) is almost always up to the judge.
Incredibly disingenuous title. Yes, China has the same real gdp per capita (PPP) that the US had in 1912. Except almost all of the United States' growth had to come from technological advances - doing things that were not known in 1912. China has the luxury that it can merely leverage known technology, allowing it to grow far more rapidly - It's infinitely easier to give all of your farmers tractors after tractors have been invented.

Now don't get me wrong; it will still take China 40+ years to catch up to where the US is today is on a per-capita basis, but it is hardly as far away as the author makes it seem.
Ask HN: Is the term "Startup" always mean Tech Startup?
I have always dreamed of building an startup but I have not yet reached a viable idea that I can start with.

So, I have a plan b - e-commerce. I have a product in mind that I want to sell online via Shopify. I won't manufacture the product myself.

The question is, does an e-commerce business (retail) qualify for the term "startup"?
I'll only speak for Composer which is a new-ish PHP dependency manager, because I'm the co-lead on the project.

System-wide packages are a massive pain, especially on shared hosts. That's why we took the approach of installing everything local, much like virtualenv or npm do. You get your dependencies for the project, in the project. Upload, done. It comes with an autoloader to load classes and it all works with relative paths, so moving it all around is no problem.

Obviously this only handles php libraries, not apt-get packages or whatever, there are tons of great tools for managing system configuration, and we did not set out to reinvent those. But php libraries can just be downloaded, a few of them might depend on specific extensions but mostly if you have a recent-ish PHP version stuff works on most shared hosts worth their name.

As for your point on adoption, I beg to differ. Symfony which is one of the largest frameworks will use it in it's upcoming 2.1 release, I know of a few other frameworks that are looking into it, many libraries are already made available. Even major apps like Drupal have been looking into using it, not for their plugins at first, only for their own dependencies, but once they also discussed the adoption of it for plugins, and I know a few other CMSs have looked at it for just that, because it's easy to wrap into a web frontend to manage installation of dependencies from anywhere. I'd even argue you could convert an entire ecosystem if you have it all in one controlled database already, generating package metadata on the fly and installing from existing sources, then giving the option to plugin authors to start requiring other plugins and plain libraries instead of bundling everything in their code.

Composer is quite new and it's definitely not widely adopted yet, but things are looking way brighter than you picture them. Given the ease of use of publishing packages (basically you have to write one package definition like in npm, and then for a new release you just have to git tag and push to github), resistance from people should be pretty low. Please see docs on http://getcomposer.org/ if you are curious.
I love how, even without a constitution, things like this would never fly in Europe, yet here in the US, WITH a constitution, we get these events taking place.

It's almost like the existence of the constitution encourages challenges to privacy. The "if you had a defense but didn't use it then you must be okay with what's happening" thinking.
Yea I know, one of the reasons anti-discrimination laws are fundamentally flawed. Fixing the root social/cultural causes is a better idea.
Twitter co-founder Dorsey's advice to young innovators
I'm currently working on an offline web app based on ST2. So far the experience is positive. Since the framework is easy to add into a html5 appcache manifest, it's relatively easy to turn it into an offline app. The ui components are very high quality. I'm also really digging the mvc architecture with device profiles, which let you adjust your views for tablets or phones with common models and controllers.

Ofcourse it's not a native app, and you can tell. Fidelity is the downside of using ST2 instead of native. The upside is easier deployment (it's just a web app), and ios, android and blackberry support from a single codebase (windows phone is coming, but not ready yet).
hmm, not sure. The CS 101 class (Build a Search Engine) does use Python.

The class description only say the following: "Learn about programming languages while building a web browser! You will understand JavaScript and HTML from the inside-out in this exciting class."
IPad share of tablet OS market falls below 50%
All mass media outlets should be considered suspicious, even if you happen to mostly agree with their bias. That's not so much 'false equivalency', as an understanding that broadcasters with a large audience are inevitably going to be used by people with cash and an agenda to get their message across.
The only problem with Google is they just have no taste.
The Hybrid Safety System (or Making Industrial Robots Safe Around Humans)
Key-value accessors aren't exactly the shining moment of verbose method names (It's even been leaked that 10.8 has dict[key] sugar), but for methods with more parameters, it's much nicer than positional. e.g.:

connection:didReceiveResponse:
addObserverForName:object:queue:usingBlock:
drawAtPoint:forWidth:withFont:minFontSize:actualFontSize:lineBreakMode:baselineAdjustment:
Two thoughts that come to mind when thinking about Pub/Sub libs:

a) jQuery has custom events out-of-the-box and code that uses them looks pretty idiomatic (as far as jQuery goes anyways)

b) I find that when it comes to fancy complex UIs, the events aren't usually the bottleneck, so I'm not sure why performance optimization for them should be a primary design concern (i.e. to the point of considering including/maintaining one more library).
Show HN: social news prototype for the publisher wanna be
Will this work in Sublime Text as is?
Yes that has bugged me quite a bit; I first noticed it when reading his essay on C [1]. But since then I've installed Vimium [2] and I never even touch the mouse anymore.

[1] http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/c/

[2] http://vimium.github.com/
Libraries, frameworks and tooling in PHP have evolved tremendously in the last couple years. If you look at the Symfony framework and its community you'll find a ton of brand new code that is state of the art, mostly inspired and building on top of ideas from other languages, most of the time improving on them too.

Node for example is lots of fun, but most of the libraries come complete with their bugs and lack of maturity. These are exciting things to work with, but not always best bang for the buck if you're aiming at being productive.

As for Ruby itself getting faster, well guess what PHP itself is getting faster all the time too [1]. You left it behind and it's still evolving without you. Shocker.

[1] http://www.php.net/archive/2012.php#id2012-03-01-1
Considering he is referencing the Maryland Dept of Corrections and the University of Virginia, a public institution, I'd say the 1st Amendment applies. UNC is also a public university and is mentioned prominently.
The Biggest Potholes in the Path of Car-Sharing