skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not entirely true, just as many people oppose the death penalty because killing is wrong as people oppose it because mistakes happen.

I personally do not agree with the death penalty (and live in a country without it) not because mistakes happen because murder is wrong, whether it's state sponsored or not. The fact that mistakes do happen just makes it even more ludicrous to me that ANYONE supports the death penalty.
They may yet blow everyone's doors off with first-class integration of Skype. But given their position in the marketplace, and carrier's dislike of anything that pushes them toward being dumb pipes any faster, color me pessimistic.

They could also seriously upend the market with a skype-only no-phone-plan, PMP/phone that runs off wifi and/or prepaid data. That could justify the price of the Skype purchase as well. And I'm just as pessimistic about that.

I'm not saying they won't ever do anything with it. But they paid a pretty penny and thus far don't seem to have any coherent plan.
I originally avoided Ruby, back at the beginning of Rails's popularity, simply because Matz admitted it was slow and he had no intention of making it faster. It has improved now of course, but I still have something lurking in the back of my mind that says Python is faster than Ruby.

Documentation is a huge thing. I found the docs difficult to navigate, and only in the last few months (whenever the latest change was) are they easier to navigate. But the descriptions are still pretty spartan and it's hard to find what function your looking for if you don't know what it's called. The way names are chosen doesn't match with my experience from other languages (Java, C, PHP, Scheme). So I tend to use Stack Overflow a lot more than the Ruby docs themselves.

A good book helps get past the hurdles of knowing what function to use for what. However, the only real examples in the Ruby books I've read are in Rails books. So that might be part of the cultural issue jamesgeck refers to. Poor docs + book focus on Rails means you can only learn Ruby for the purpose of Rails, and that typecasts it as a web language.

Note that PHP is stuck as a web language even more than Ruby. PHP is meant to be one, of course, but it's still usable as a general systems scripting language. I've written a nightly cronjob billing system in PHP since then the web frontend, which was PHP, and the cron job back end could all share the same billing libraries. I've also written small compilers and other scripts in PHP. That was before I was very comfortable with Python and Ruby (and had most of PHP's standard lib memorized), but PHP still worked fine.

I tend to use Ruby now for most scripts, except where other people require me to use Python, like where some shared team library I need only works with Python. So, there are at least SOME cases where Python is mandatory and not voluntary.
Related: California has placed the Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act (the SAFE California Act) on the November 2012 ballot.

The move to get this on the ballot was led by a former warden of California's San Quentin prison, Jeanne Woodford:

“California is on the brink of replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole as the maximum punishment for murder,” Woodford said. “In November, voters will have the first opportunity ever to decide between the death penalty and a sentence of life in prison with absolutely no chance of parole. Back in 1978, we did not have an alternative sentence that would keep convicted killers behind bars forever. We certainly did not know that we would spend $4 billion on 13 executions. Our system is broken, expensive and it always will carry the grave risk of a mistake. SAFE California offers a solution with savings at a time when we’re laying off teachers and cutting vital services.”

I urge support of this measure:

http://www.safecalifornia.org/act
Teens build fighter jet flight simulator for Maker Faire
This should be a contreversal comment, so I'm going to say now that I'm just posting this rebuttal and not getting into an e-argument.

The criminal system isn't for punishment. It's for reform. It's not to 'get back' at people, it's to help integrate people back into society and act as a deterrent to stop crime in the first place. You're not trying to 'execute this fucker and others like him', you're trying to figure out what's wrong, how you can reform (if possible), and deter other crimes like it. If you're just executing it's a hell of a deterrence, but you're not reforming at all.

Remember the Oslo masscare? Read up on the perpetrator and his sentence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik
2012 Salary Guide for Technology and IT Professionals [pdf]
JavaScript design patterns – Adapter, decorator, and factory
Yeah, you're right. I wrote without checking, I have this command in muscle memory.

:).
Yeah, I was trying to use some of the mathematics libraries for ruby, and found that we've got a lot of ports of things like NumPy that were created around 2006, and haven't been maintained - and there are multiple half-baked forks floating around trying to keep them running, and so the documentation is wrong.

It's bad enough that I'm just going to switch to Python for this project.
When you say "proper closures", do you mean anonymous functions? I can't think of any other reason why Python's closures wouldn't be considered proper.

EDIT: Interesting, I've never run into that behavior before. Looks like you'd have to explicitly mark that variable as global if you want to mutate it:

x = 0
def foo():
global x
x = x + 1
print x
foo()

However, after reading the rationale[1], I tend to agree with this requirement:

"This isn't a bug; it's by design. Because there's an assignment to 'a' in the function 'y', 'a' is considered local to that function. (It doesn't matter where the assignment happens within the function; the presence of an assignment anywhere is enough to make 'a' local for the entirety of 'y'.)"

[1] http://bugs.python.org/issue9049#msg108309
42% of URLs have Open Graph tags
I think that's a rather narrow definition of censorship. Maybe you would prefer the term 'suppressed'. Either way, the intent is to signal to readers, "the community consensus is that this comment is not valuable, or does not add to the discussion. It is likely not worth your time to read".
Self-Learning: The New Master’s Degree [Infographic]
Self-Learning: The New Master’s Degree
Deploying Django is hard.
Is Chef/Puppet too complicated?
I know both of them are amazing tools, and have great feature sets. But maybe, just maybe, they are like Word/Excel, which I probably only use < 10% feature in my lifetime. To me, a bash-based script language would be much better than a DSL.

Is it just me?
A bedrock principle of a civilized society is that the price to be paid to ensure that no innocent is ever falsely convicted, is that some guilty might be acquitted.

The death penalty is the ultimate irreversible penalty. Don't you think it's better to give people life in prison instead of death.

You should read up about the death penalty as a deterrent. Do you really think Ajmal expected to even get out of the mission alive? Do you think he didn't know about the death penalty if he managed to escape alive.
This is seems to be a one off occurence. The articles and comments on this site are the best I know of. It hasn't degenerated like slashdot did while I was an active participant there.

That said, feel free to make a new one that's pure technology. If the stream of articles there is interesting, I promise to sign up!
Murder means intent. It makes them guilty of manslaughter, at best. I don't know if there's any legal precedent for that (I'm not a lawyer), but I'd imagine that a civil case by the deceased's family for a wrongful death would be in order.
In terms of imperative languages, python is #2 for me. And really I haven't done much python in the last couple of years mainly because anything I would want to do in python I'd rather do in ruby. Of course you will definitely hear me say, "I'd rather use python than Y" but I'd also say, "I'd rather use ruby than python"

I don't even get what he's trying to get at in paragraph three. From looking at jobs for startups and jobs in the Bay Area I can see that a large majority of them are using python over ruby. So python compared to ruby is relatively more popular at least from a job-seekers perspective.

So even though this is true, he singles out that ruby may possibly have compromised it's original philosophy with rails because of its popularity but yet python hasn't been affected at all by its mass popularity from most startups and science/academia companies using it? Python also has a pretty popular framework in django yet I don't really see any pressure by Guido to change python because of it.

Really this article is a pretty ignorant view of ruby since he himself admits he does not know much about ruby. So why bother writing that last paragraph other than for the sole purpose of putting down ruby? The last paragraph feels pretty tacked on and seems to be a nice jab at ruby for no reason other than he likes python.

Let me just end by saying, I love python, but I love ruby more. I don't have any ill-will towards python. But consider if this article was written about ruby and dhh wrote it. How much vitriol do you think dhh would get from writing an article like that?
I agree.

I was just pointing out that what you said about Python I could say about Ruby or Perl, some other guy about C++, ...

For example, I hate significant white space and if I had to use Python I would be miserable, but for you it's the best language in the world.

Sure, we can argue about what percent of the total users of a given language would use it if they had a freedom to choose a different one.
Great Customer Experience Creates More Revenue Opportunities
I would love to see Go being used instead of Java, however unlikely that may be (don't think the Android guys would be that thrilled to throw out all their work). This article, though, doesn't really make a good case for it. It just says, "Hey, Go is BSD licensed, and they call it a systems language! Look, here's Hello World!"
Does the other cloud providers seem reasonable to you? If so then you might want to spend time investigating. As a dev evangelist for OpenShift, I can say it doesn't take much time to get a simple app up and running. Come by #openshift on freenode and we can help you if you get stuck
I understand what you're saying, but I still don't feel that its relevant. Your example is the sort of thing that I would expect myself and other developers to be able to produce a more reliable solution on their own than what they could copy-and-paste from the web. In other words, I wouldn't do it myself because I felt like I "had to scratch that itch." I would do it myself because otherwise I would have no trust that it would work.
I'd hope so.

(http://www.falstad.com/gravity.html)

"What happens if you drop a pen on the moon?"

If a pen is dropped on a moon, will it:
A) Float away
B) Float where it is
C) Fall to the surface of the moon

This question was asked to students studying physics across a range of levels. I don't know if they just cherry picked the really bad answers. I have no idea how these US educational course translate to international courses.

> "The gravity of the moon can be said to be negligible, and also the moon's a vacuum, there is no external force on the pen. Therefore it will float where it is."

> "Gravity will not pull it down, because there is less of it. It shouldn't float away just because I've never seen it happen. There's a balance between gravity and the opposite force."
> (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.)

The OP is below this threshold.
Air Hockey - HTML5 real-time multiplayer 3D action
Here in Poland there are two kinds of 'Python' job offers:

- web development, with "knowledge of Django a plus"
- a job title without Python in it (Software Tester etc) requiring "a scripting language (Bash/Perl/Python/Ruby)"

Ruby job offers are almost exclusively Rails offers. Ruby is not even widely acknowledged as a scripting language.
> But then if you think about it for two seconds you have to wonder why we want a good signal of these students’ ability. This is not assessment for accreditation so who cares about getting such incentives right? What one surely wants are problem sets that signal to the student whether they had mastered the material or not

First, I think their business model (talent discovery and job placement) depends on good assessment of students' ability. At least, this is Udacity's business model[1].

Second, I think that the OP's assumption that this is not for accreditation is wrong. I think they do want Coursera's statement of accomplishment to be valuable on it's own (even if "Stanford" is not mentioned in it). For instance, if I were an employer, I'd hire anyone with Coursera's statement of accomplishment in a challenging class as the Probabilistic Graphical Models class [2]. Of course, the only problem is, as the OP mentions:

> For online courses, no one has cracked how to verify whether an identified student is the same person as the one doing the assessment.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3859253

[2] The class started with 44000 students [3]; by the 4th week there were about ~2000 left [4]; my guess is there are around 1000 left after the crazy 5th assignment... Though, One may argue that these statistics in part are due to rough edges and cryptic instructions in some of the programming assignments and quizzes.

[3] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-01/daphne-kolle...

[4] according to the published class' 4th week quiz statistics.
I thought this was a bit obvious.. whenever Go matures.
Categorically opposed to the death penalty for every possible reason: moral, religious, practical. But: what the hell is this article doing on HN?

No shit, you say? Capital punishment is inane, unjust, and difficult to justify in a message board thread? Wow! Glad we sorted that out! Can we move on now?

If every legitimate social justice issue had a hearing on HN, the front page would be nothing but social justice issues.

Flagged.
If I understand correctly, does this mean that a map operation (that is not reduced further; i.e. we want a collection as the output) could be carried out in parallel efficiently using reducers only if there is an efficient (O(1)) way to concatenate the collections produced at each combining step (in the "internal nodes" of the fork-join computation tree)?

This would constrain how collections are implemented to make good use of this technique.
Wow. I'm severely underpaid as a web developer w/ 2 years experience. That was a depressing read. :(
I wish there was a guide like this for Canadian cities.
It used to be effectively impossible for anyone outside Apple to develop anything for the iPhone.

The device was still a zillion seller.
Being caught on tape or identified by an eyewitness isn't conclusive evidence of guilt. The guy in this article who was wrongly executed looked almost exactly like the person who actually committed the murder.
Static Blog Generators
The Kozmo Trap: What small businesses can learn from a dot-com debacle.
Great - independent, open-source defense lawyering.

Make sure when you read a press release like this, though, that if there isn't a press release saying the courts have convicted an innocent man, there isn't a press release at all. Which means Professor Liebman and his students have wasted their time. Which they don't want to do, so they are anything but disinterested investigators.

I mean, you're not going to see a headline that says "Murderer walks free in Texas, probe says." I mean, duh. That happens all the time, so who cares? There's certainly no market for an independent, open-source prosecution...
Before responding to you directly, I'll say this: Killing is always wrong and therefore the death penalty is always wrong.

> I firmly believe that some people have to pay the ultimate price for their deeds, but I insist that these people should have so much evidence pointing them to having done the act that there is no possible way that they could be innocent.

I would say that condition is 100% impossible to meet, and would present that as an argument against the death penalty.

> also sets a deterrent for future criminals wishing to do something similar.

This does not exist. At least, it has not been reliably shown that this exists. The intensity of the punishment for a crime has not been shown to correlate with the number of criminals committing the crime. There have been studies that show both results (that increasing punishment decreases future crime, and that it doesn't).

You cannot base real ideas on the assumption that the death penalty will deter potential future murders. There's no reason to believe that's the case.
Never mind that. Look at how they are distributed in terms of IP (v4) addresses.

198.41.0.4 192.228.79.201 192.33.4.12 128.8.10.90 192.203.230.10 192.5.5.241 192.112.36.4 128.63.2.53 192.36.148.17 192.58.128.30 193.0.14.129 199.7.83.42 202.12.27.33

Back off to the /3 level. All but two of them (128.8.10.90 and 128.63.2.53) are in 192.0.0.0/3.

Guess what happens if someone fat-fingers a sync connection and adds one with a netmask of /3 instead of /30? If it's in the right part of the net, you lose a whole bunch of stuff, but two of the roots keep working.

This makes for some very interesting troubleshooting. I witnessed this once, and it was bizarre: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/08/blackhole/

I wonder what else might be tripped up by this kind of aggregation gone wrong? It seems like spreading them out some more could be useful in some really bad situations.

Edit: also, look at the /4 and /5 level and so on. Most of them have a lot in common, actually.
I agree with you, but I can think of another reason to petition against the death penalty besides mistakes. I don't think we should grant that kind of power to states because they tend to misuse it. This is more apparent in less democratic states, where the death penalty is an easy means to silence opposition.
With that said, the US is surprisingly slow in abolishing this horrendous practice, especially if you consider this graph in this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_capital_punishment_by_co...
I would love to see this happen, but I think its more likely the dart vm will replace the java vm.
The Email Zuckerberg Sent To Cut His Cofounder Out Of Facebook
"Eye witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence in science. Which is sad, because it's the highest form of evidence in the court of law."

Neil D. Tyson
I can do that (I think I can flag, but this was not always the case), and silently grow to hate the content on HN as flagging fails to catch the borderline cases (and possibly devalue each individual flag).

Or I can break that rule to voice displeasure and hope that someone shared that opinion enough to point me somewhere better, create somewhere better, or effect change.

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

My account is over a year old (and I've lurked for longer). Therefore, I'm good!

But in all seriousness, while it probably is not turning into Reddit, I'm certainly planning to relegate HN, for the purposes of my news browsing / time management, to a category shared with other spammy news sites, for somewhat similar reasons.
Hmm, what if the creator makes it free, to start with, with the goal of selling/merging it?

The users might feel used.
Chocolat persuades you to buy their app by changing font to comic sans
WordPress Is Now A ~$50 Million Business, But It Still Won’t Take My Money
Yeah, I stopped reading at "Objective-C, which is about as proprietary as can be."
LinuxMint 13RC isos published. Stable and sleek already.
Brad Fitzpatrick, one of the core Go developers, used to work on Android.

There are regular discussions on the golang-nuts mailing list about Go on Android: https://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/search?q=android

I certainly hope for Go as a core Android language.
Please write more posts so formulaic they can be transferred with ease.
Projects are the New Job Interviews
Along with XCode comes the iOS simulator, debug tools, publishing/packaging and certificate handling. And of course there is more to it: diminishing returns.
Facebook and Twitter Postings Cost CFO His Job
ThinkPad X1 Carbon, 14-inch Ultrabook Ivy Bridge, 3G and 1600 x 900
Completely agree. Stop upvoting this, folks!
Don't Github, Automattic, and 37Signals all have offices?
Something like the Dunning–Kruger effect applied to ethics?
The new crop of online courses is awesome, but what's even more awesome is imagining how much they can (and will) improve in the next few years.

Coursera's current production quality, style, and platform leaves much to be desired. Andrew and Daphne should realize that flipping the classroom is not enough. The whole point of flipping the classroom is that most learning happens _outside_ the lecture hall. In an online context, this means that the emphasis must be on creating engaging and useful exercises and a vibrant online community. It also means that lectures have to be _far better_ than those delivered in the classroom. Taking your old powerpoints and inking over them while running screen-capture software just doesn't cut it. Ask Vi Hart.

In addition, Coursera classes are run mostly within the framework designed for a university course -- complete with rigid schedules and limits on collaboration (dictated by honor code). If my goal is simply to "learn some subset of X", not "learn all of X in a given time frame and get tested on it", this is all unnecessary baggage.

When Udacity completely separated itself from Stanford a few months back, I thought it was a risky move putting them at a disadvantage. Right now, Udacity is producing better content. When we come to a point that it is the quality of education that matters and not the branding, they might be significantly ahead.
Canadian tech protester acquitted on all charges from G20 arrest
Flagged. The FAQ is clear: if this could be on CNN, then it shouldn't be on HN.
Awesome app, albeit similar to algodoo!
“The best of Twitter in your inbox” – Thanks, but no thanks
Brand New App Looking for your feedback
Ask Forgiveness, Not Permission: Dish Ad-Skipping Tech Irks TV Execs
I think this comment is sarcastic.
To be clear, you are comparing a sharded Riak cluster against an unsharded MongoDB installation?
CollegeBudget Acquires Munch On Me (YC S11)
Explore the amazing Dubai Safari project‎
Friend Scan Me is a new way to add friends to your social networks in the real world.
Description
Simplify your real world life contacts by translating your social networks into a QR code.

Others can scan your QR code and add you as a friend instantly! No more fumbling with email addresses or spelling names, just scan, confirm, and you're done!
Pluto has much more in common with Eris, Sedna, Quaoar, Makemake, and Haumea (and probably with dozens or hundreds of yet-to-be-discovered similarly-sized icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit) than with the rocky bodies of the inner system.
In Ontario, Michael Rafferty & Terri-Lynn McClinic were recently convicted of the murder of Tori Stafford. Lots of pro-capital punishment banter as of late. In this case, it was pretty open/shut. You could say he is the perfect candidate for capital punishment. I wouldn't, but many would.

My problem is – our judicial system pretending these people can be reconditioned, like a refurbished electronic or something. Terri-Lynn McClintic was wicked well before the murder, even doing things like microwaving a small dog until it cried.

These people cannot be reconditioned. And when you take a look at the science, it comes down to bad wiring. So does killing them make sense knowing that they are mentally damaged and not simply moonlighting as maniacs?

With tongue in cheek, we need Minority Report-style decommissioning. Technology to the rescue.