skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand the rationale for coercing strings to numbers for an operation that is not valid on strings, but coercing strings to numbers just because it's possible is clearly a terrible idea. It's like they looked at JavaScript and decided that the == operator was just not hazardous enough.
Pentest Magazine Auditing and Standards New April 2012 Issue
Here is epubcheck if that helps anyone: https://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/

Seems to be a typo in index.md, and a bug in Pandoc which lets non-well-formed xml tags pass through unquoted.
This post is scary.
Hey thanks! I just grabbed a Subtle Pattern background :) if this becomes more popular I'll redesign the entire app :D
Personally I like the fact that PhoneGap apps are based on a webview, but unfortunately the performance of this webview seems to be very sluggish -- at least on my Samsung Galaxy SII.
This is the project that convinced me to enroll in Systems Design Engineering at University of Waterloo!
For OS X, you might also consider Shift+Option+CMD+V, which pastes using the formatting of the target document. I have found this does not work for all target applications, however. (PowerPoint is one. Lame.)

If you find you always desire to paste without formatting, you can remap CMD+V in OS X:

* Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts
* Click the + under the right-hand list to add a shortcut
* Application: All; Menu Title: Paste and Match Style; Keyboard Shortcut: type CMD+V

Ask MetaFilter's discussion of above:
http://ask.metafilter.com/187733/OSX-How-to-copy-plaintext-a...
Not defending the bad design decision, but string comparison in PHP is strcmp, not ==.
PHP gets input from various places, and one might want "1.00" from a form or URL to equal "1.0" read from a cookie or via database adapter that stringifies everything.
I've done iOS applications natively and with PhoneGap. The apps that I did with PhoneGap have only been deployed to iOS so there hasn't been a lot of benefit in developing with PhoneGap. I'd say development time was roughly 1:1. If those apps get deployed to other platforms, then it's a huge win.

To get the experience I wanted on PhoneGap I've benefitted from being able to work natively. And I've also needed to develop functionality that didn't exist as plugins, which being able to jump to obj-c helped with too.
One line in this article may have given me an epiphany:
>" If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it."

My primary objection to TDD is that it doesn't seem to work, because when I've tried it, the tests caught no bugs at all. I believe that tests can be important for APIs to prevent regressions when you have to work with external components, but its frustrating to put time into tests and then never have the tests fail.

Its not that I'm a perfect programmer, its the kind of bugs I make. The kind of bugs I make are caught by the compiler. This may be because, over the years of my career (many of which occurred long before the idea of "test first" was widely heard) I've trained myself in a style of programming where I can trust the compiler to catch my mistakes (most of which are typos, frankly.)

I don't know if others can do this, but for me, it came about by doing things like:

Old way:
if (variable == 1) then whatever
New way:
if (1 == variable) then whatever

Every time I mistype that as "(1 = variable) the compiler catches it because I can't redefine 1.
I haven't dug in to this too much, but how exactly does PhoneGap 1.6 fix this issue? Is it mapping localStorage to app-specific filesystem storage now? I know there's a plugin that does something to that effect, seems like the most appropriate solution.
This is a wacky title. Maxwell's equations ultimately caused a rethinking of the nature of space and time.

Is that really what is implied here?
Iubenda privacy policy (like 500px, but you can generate your own)
Interesting project. If you're the developer - I would like to see the ability to view the encrypted message without viewing the page source.
The Bar Has Gotten Higher (thoughts from a VC on raising today)
People, if you need random numbers for some application of yours, you shouldn't get them from their server, period. See alternatives in the posts here. The most modern example, apparently the following hardware instruction will be available in all next Intel processors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand

The main article is just to appreciate the pure awesomeness of us being able to actually see something that's a result of quantum fluctuations! In vacuum!
In this perspective, writing `strcmp` everywhere is not boilerplate, but a requirement.

(Such that

strcmp('9223372036854775807', '9223372036854775808');

returns -1, meaning the strings are not equal.)
Lately I've been toying with a jQuery pub/sub that publishes based on changeData events: https://gist.github.com/2136216
The answer to why there are more female founders in New York than the Valley is easy: Valley startups tend to be a lot more tech-heavy than NYC startups as a whole. And women in general aren't drawn to deep technology. I find it interesting how whenever issues of women and technology come up, everyone gets all pc and pretends not to know what the root of the gender gap is. But then if you ask them to count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction, they can't. Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change. Tech heavy centers like Silicon Valley will always have a preponderence of male entrepreneurs and less tech heavy centers like NYC will always be more appealing to female entrepreneurs. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.
It has everything to do with NYC being more than a tech hub. It's arguably the fashion and business capital of the world and the startups that we get here tend to reflect that.
Having people from all backgrounds building businesses around real problems in their industries sets it apart from SV, where you get people doing startups for the sake of startups.
The actual printer unit I'm using (i.e. not including the Arduino components) is $50/£40 and is increasingly available:

https://www.adafruit.com/products/600
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10438
http://proto-pic.co.uk/thermal-printer/

See https://github.com/freerange/printer/wiki/Making-your-own-pr... for more information...
Please have a look at the comments by "jabakobob at gmail dot com" and myself ("nikic@php.net"). They explain why such behavior is actually good, in most cases.
If you want to sort by anything other than the number of hits in every facet, then there is information about the facets that only the search engine really knows. For instance, which facet holds the most relevant results?
I didn't dig deep in to the docs - just played with the demos - but if all data is exposed as 'just' a URL - what implications are there for security? Can someone mod the JS to grab someone else's data associated with my app? They probably have answers for this, but it wasn't apparent in the demos I looked at.
As that system has done with six exceptions since confederation (Laurier in 1900 and 1904, Borden in 1917, Mackenzie King in 1940, Diefenbaker in 1958, Mulroney in 1984). In fact ruling parties having over 50% of the votes in Canadian election is the exception rather then the rule.

The only way to make sure the general populace vote = ruling party is to have an American style two party system, and frankly, I've heard very few good things about that. IMO Canada has a decent balance; parties on the fringe either adapt or assimilate, and all parties gravitate to the political centre if they want success. It saves having two powerful parties for long, and prevents the dog breakfest of some countries where there's 15 different names on the ballot.
Is it illegal to posses these tools btw?

I know some jurisdictions treat hacking tools the same as burglary tools, which is really dumb if you're just trying to test your own system's security.
Legal documents are similar to computer programs in that they must be very precise and follow strict rules of construction. The comments in a program's source code would not suffice as instructions to a computer, and neither would an annotation to a legal document suffice for the document itself.
I agree. It seems like 500px is trying to think outside the box to communicate the intentions behind their ToS so that the experience is more transparant. I would assume the thinking is that either almost nobody will read the ToS as is, but maybe some people will actually read the simplified version. The issue of course is that legalese is dense and a simplification is not adequate. As an alternative, I would like to see how people react to a simple statement BEFORE the ToS that explains the company's intentions as an introduction.
Are you referring to bluetooth-central? That’s for the CoreBluetooth framework, which in turn is only for Bluetooth Low Energy:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/Miscel...
Just out of curiosity, what was your turnaround at age 17? (When you started professionally, I mean.)
This Hack Lets You See What Facebook Thinks You Like Best
If only we had some sort of way of explicitly telling our computers that we wanted to to convert a sequence of characters into a number.
No, you just need strict comparison (like you need it in JS and any other language with weak typing):

php > var_dump('9223372036854775807' == '9223372036854775808');
bool(true)
php > var_dump('9223372036854775807' === '9223372036854775808');
bool(false)
The A9 website says "Developed by A9, Amazon CloudSearch is built with the same innovative technology that powers search for Amazon.com."
I just started developing mobile apps with Appcelerator. Any reason I should have gone with PhoneGap? I want to begin building basic data-driven apps for my clients and I like Appcelerator from what I've seen so far.

No experience with Java or Obj-C (I'm a n00b programmer and decent web developer) and wanted to start banging out apps ASAP.
Hackers can be sick sick people
A side question, which seems worth asking as long as this is floating at the top of HN ...

We try to rotate in fresh projects into the list of Backbone apps on the homepage:

http://backbonejs.org/#examples

... but there are often many more interesting things out there in the wild than we're necessarily aware of -- for example: Rdio, the new GoogleArtProject.com, and Pitchfork.com. Are you currently working on a fun Backbone app, or have you seen one recently that we might not have heard about?
Um, this seems to imply that no framework is being used :-S

The number of posts comparing PHP - a bare language, albeit one that is targeted at the web - with a fully featured framework is scary.

Try building the same application in pure, straight-up ruby vs in PHP. I bet PHP will be faster. But that's not really the point. Nowadays, we use frameworks, so feel free to compare Kohana or Zend to Rails but comparing a language to a framework is silly.
Hey. Yeah, we have an ACL system for specifying who can read/write data at each location. So you can lock down your application data to keep it secure. The API for this is still in flux though, so it's not documented. Coming soon though! :-)
You can do literal comparison using ===

But the problem in my perception is that it is very error-prone. A less error-prone solution would be only convert one string value to number when the another is really a number. For example:

'9223372036854775807' == 9223372036854775808
I know there are problems with it, but at least OOo and Google Docs etc. can usually interpret my documents OK. That's not exactly a glowing review but it's enough for me and most people to get work done.
This sounds like the way you get to creating a Web Commerce Server-as-a-Service. Pricing and Inventory goes into the cloud, and you get all the standard retail searchability "for free" i.e. dis-contiguous price searches, etc.
The Truths, Untruths, and Fuzzy Truths of Cloud Security
Interesting reading on cloud and security, check it out!
Never understood the Lisp-mania: how could you like a language where you won't get a type error until after you run the program?
There's also a demographic difference between New York and Silicon Valley. Some figures from the 2010 census:

New York City, Female persons: 52.5%

San Francisco County, Female persons: 49.3%
San Mateo County, Female persons: 50.8%
Santa Clara County, Female persons: 49.8%
Hacking email: getting things done by bypassing the inbox
Well done to whoever spotted this.
I signed up to this site, and now I will delete my account. The simplifications are not accurately simplifying what they should be. Which I think is silly, since the majority of us can read and think, and see that in some cases the simplifications barely match whats actually being said.

And I point also and especially to wording like this, which leaves me outright cold to them as a product
"The registration information you provide must be accurate, complete, and current at all times. Failure to do so constitutes a breach of the Terms, which may result in immediate termination of your 500px account."

This is a website, that I put photos on, not an application for something serious.
New York never ceases to amaze! Almost half of founders are women... I'm sure that can only be a good thing for the diversity of problems solved, and those startups' availability to address wider audiences. Obviously Silicon Valley needs to learn from NYC.
I will never have to jailbreak my Mac. Because I will not buy a computer that requires jailbreaking.
i agree with your main point, but saying that the title is a reference to Akon is a bit silly
On the other hand, most developed countries have declining birthrates, so is there cause for alarm?
> If you have a modernish machine running Linux, find out if it has a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) built in.

How do you determine that on Linux?
As a frontend guy this is HUGE. I can build apps in hours/days instead of taking weeks+ to learn node.js/ruby/etc.
It seems there's not really much to show here. And the request invite button doesn't work for me on Fiefox.
This sort of thing is an intrinsic property of floating point math. It has limited precision. When the numbers get sufficiently large, that precision is insufficient to distinguish successive integers. That is to say, this is symptomatic of PHP implementing floating point stuff correctly.

This is what ghci (Haskell) says:

Prelude> 9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808
False
Prelude> 9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0
True

This is what Python says:

>>> 9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808
False
>>> 9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0
True

Here is what SBCL (Common Lisp) says:

* (= 9223372036844775807 9223372036844775808)
NIL
* (= 9223372036844775807.0 9223372036844775808.0)
T

Lua:

> print(9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808)
true (!!!!!)
> print(9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0)
true

Javascript:

alert(9223372036844775807 == 9223372036844775808)
true (!!!!!)
alert(9223372036844775807.0 == 9223372036844775808.0)
true

Other languages that will also do this[1]: Javascript, Lua. Languages that won't: anything with actual, honest-to-god integers, and not floats or doubles masquerading as them.[2] Languages that actually handle numbers sensibly: Lisp.[3] I'm not familiar with any others that actually treat rational numbers like rational numbers, but I expect there are some. (It's still, of course, impossible to treat real numbers like real numbers, meaning that this sort of thing will also happen there.)

[1] Well, not the string-to-number bit, but whatever.

[2] Except for the niggle that they'll still do this when you're using floating point numbers, because this is what floating point numbers do.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_tower
Charity is very clearly the domain of rich guys winding down their careers and/or trying to buy their way into heaven. It would be a total distraction for someone in his prime.
Solr or Sphinx based searching is what pushed me out of most of the PaaS offerings and into my own VPS. It's unfortunate that most of the hosted services out there are too expensive for side projects.

When I looked at WebSolr, the cost exceeded my entire VPS structure, even for their cheapest plans.
I'm sure the market pressure coming from employees like you will correct this mistake. Companies that make charitable donations simply won't be able to compete with those that do as they will lose some of their employees.

Or maybe the market feels differently?
Link to source article in the McKinsey Quarterly (free, but requires registration)

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_second_economy_2853

Also, see this piece from Jaron Lanier for a much more tech-oriented and cerebral treatment of much of the same subject matter

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip
Their product may be really great, but the company seems unable to support it. I ordered my key in October, never received it, and have been mailing them periodically ever since, perhaps 20 times, trying to resolve it with them. To date I have received one response. Their response ignored everything I had said, and assured me it would arrive soon, even though I'd explained in my email that I'd changed addresses.

I hope one day this will be resolved, because it really seems like a cool device.
Your first 50 (paying) customers are always the hardest (A story)
Superfeedr Heroku Addon
I like your point about 20% test-first and 80% test-after. I always felt dirty/wrong/stupid/naive when arguing for this type of approach. Sometimes I just need to explore a few approaches before I settle on one, and if I’m writing proper tests before each exploration, then I lose my creative momentum very quickly.
James, I met you a couple weeks ago in the pub with Chris Roos. I would love to come over and check this out. Looks dope!
In short, the downsides:

- You're limited to the number of "native" hooks you have access to, and cross-platform feature parity is iffy.

- Can't verify this personally, but I've heard Android and Windows Phone apps can be very slow due to their webview wrappers kind of sucking. iOS is great though.

- PhoneGap doesn't offer any sort of native UI elements, so if you want your app to look like a "real" iPhone app you have to build the UI from either CSS, which gets hardware-intensive when you start throwing in tons of gradients and shadows, and is difficult to make look exactly like the native elements - or images, which will look like crap when Apple releases a new higher-resolution device. (Not a huge issue, but there are still a lot of apps with non-Retina graphics.)

- Interactive elements (page transitions, glow/shadow/gradient effects, animations) can be very, very slow. There are ways around most of the speed issues - using hardware-accelerated CSS, detecting touch events instead of click events - but it can be hairy.

- Fixing bugs is rough. PhoneGap doesn't dump Javascript errors to log like a web browser does, so you'll have to deal with your app randomly not responding for no apparent reason and spending an hour hunting until you find that one typo or missing semicolon.

But, the upsides:

- Getting from point A to a working prototype takes significantly less time.

- Porting to other platforms, while tricky if your app relies heavily on native hooks, is significantly easier than completely rewriting.

- Personal opinion, but HTML + CSS + Javascript is just a nicer environment to develop with.

- Every new iOS release comes with new features that make developing web apps a lot easier. iOS 5 brought native-style inertial scrolling to overflow: scroll, true fixed elements with position: fixed (though fixed elements still have some quirks), for example.

I'd highly recommend giving it a shot. You can be up and running with a working HTML/CSS/JS app in the iPhone Simulator in like 10 minutes. Hard to argue with that.
"One thing I'd like to comment on is that I think you should revise your use of unsafeThaw/unsafeFreeze: you don't easily get guarantees of determinism when using these unsafe functions."

Unfortunately that seems to be the only way to get a mutable Vector from a
immutable one without copying it. As long as the mutable version of the
vector isn't used anymore after calling set, it should be safe. But yes,
guarantees are always nicer.

Nice to learn about the SPECIALIZE pragma. :)
I think your best options are LeJOS (Java for Mindstorms) or the Sun SPOT ( http://www.sunspotworld.com/ ). Both are a bit pricier than the (already overpriced) Arduino, but the Sun SPOT is a lot more powerful computationally.
Why Facebook Bought Instagram
Reducing the stress of configuration management with Git
Same on iOS 5.1.
LogMeIn Prepares To Take On Dropbox
One problem with giving extra cash to employees is that the government takes a chunk of it as tax.[1]

It should be possible to arrange a system where two or three charities are selected (with employee involvement) and allow employees to select which one they'd like "their split" to go to.

And companies don't have to just give cash. They can allow their workers time to participate in volunteering; or they can provide logistical support for some projects, etc.

EDIT: [1] At least, in the UK the employee would have to pay tax on the funds.
RedHat and IBM join the OpenStack Foundation
Wedding IVR
Bitcoin is not anonymous. It's the opposite. Every transaction is public. And how do you propose to obtain the bitcoin in the first place?
20 Trendy iPhone 4/4S Cases You Can Buy
Well, "why such behaviour is good" is stretching it. Maybe just "why such behaviour is"?
BS alert. Another "machines are killing jobs/our future" rant. I'm pretty sure people said the same thing when Gutenberg developed the printing press. There's no "Second Economy".

And the whole thing "it's just computers talking to computers" is ridiculous. The phone started with actual operators in every village, and then moved to fully automated systems. It did not void the economy of jobs. All productivity gains bring new opportunities, new business ideas, and new means to make profits.

The biggest misunderstanding of this article is that the goal of business is not to "create jobs", it is to create wealth. Jobs are a means to create more wealth, because you need manpower and brains for many things that cannot be made by machines alone. That won't change for a while. Automation is simply removing a lot of these jobs that had very little value in the first place.
Startup marketing - does competition matter?
In other news, Dell Ships Every Computer with Tons of Crapware
I got my AdWords account unsuspended by not giving up
On iOS, the webview is certainly fast enough - no lag or stuttering in scrolling or touch events - but I've heard Android and Windows Phone still leave a lot to be desired. I haven't personally dug in to either yet, though.
What Google Drive could mean for other Google products
If you're a young person looking to buy a home, you need to have your head examined. Doubly so if it's in Toronto or Vancouver. From research I've done into this, it's really better to just rent, and will be barring either legislation expelling speculators out of the market, or the housing bubble bursting.

And also, what talentdeficit said.
If you read the docs, he's not programming the microcontroller in JavaScript - just running a native shim on the microcontroller and then communicating via serial. So it's basically a node.js library to use an Arduino as a dumb I/O card for your PC, not to program the Arduino in JS.
So, you support socially beneficial companies, yet object to companies diversifying their social contributions by a percentage or so? I'm sorry, but I just don't buy the argument that donating a percentage of equity from each founder would be distractive.
I agree with your general argument about NYC. SV isn't only where you get "people doing startups for the sake of startups" (although it has that). It is more technology focused and less "all business" like NYC.