skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are many reasons why I use C++ only if I must, even though I know it very well.

- Maintaining two slightly different versions of most declarations is unproductive.

- Not having a stack trace when the program crashes slows down debugging tremendously.

- C++ compilers are horribly slow

- Shared pointers are very slow memory hogs but not using them makes memory management a lot more error prone.

- C++ isn't faster than Java any longer, sometimes even a lot slower, unless memory is the bottlenck (which is often the case though)

I use C++ only if I absolutely must determine the exact memory layout of data structures.
I think he meant historically, when we were still either hunter-foragers or early agrarians. Elders were idle mouths that needed feeding, but provided minimal tangible benefits to the tribe at hand.
In a practical sense, sure, people do this everyday.

In an ethical sense, it should disturb us that we are being required to lie as a matter of course to lead our everyday lives.
AppDrone - Automate the Mundane
It serves spam when I request the page with curl, and goes away if I put a user agent header in there with "Firefox/12.0". Odd.
ITunes: Adding Media Files Automatically
I use Monit to start my webapps - it is cross platform (none of that systemd vs upstart business) and I get a lot of tools (admin panels, etc.) to use with it.

The con is that I dont get a lot of advanced dependency management in case of worker threads, but unless you go to specialized tools like God or Bluepill, it is good enough.
The worst experience I've had with this sort of thing is under release from jail. I've been arrested 3 times for civil disobedience actions and each time on my way out the officer on duty told me to sign some papers indicating the conditions of my release, that I've received all my property, etc. Each time, when I began to read the papers before signing them, they've told me if I don't sign them without reading them, they would put me back in my cell and hold me at least another few hours.

After my first arrest, they would not release me until I signed a paper saying that I received all my property but would not let me inspect my property first. They put my bag of property on the floor across the room and said I could stand about ten feet away from the bag to look at it. Needless to say, once I actually received my bag, I found that there was property missing. Nothing of great value (a hat, a bandana), but it was still pretty irritating.
Apple OK to Refile Patent Complaints Against Samsung
It makes it easier for contributors to hack on if the code is HTML/JS/CSS.

It'll let them iterate faster - just change code and reload. No recompilation needed.
Rumors of IE9 on the Xbox 360
I have the feeling that in the beginning, the idea of preserving your tabs was precisely because you wanted them to be prerendered. Then it became a way to have some sort of "front line bookmarking"
I'd have liked better ptr features. The auto-cleanup is good. Is it flexible enough to do other things like: auto-close (a file ptr); auto-deref (a ref-counted thing); auto-unlock (a critical section) etc?
This. The name doesn't matter. The signing act is all that counts. Before literate times the illiterate would "sign" by simply marking an "X" on the signature line. If you are under duress you may certainly sign your signature as "Under Duress", if the accepting party doesn't harm you right away at least when you show up in court to dispute it your can point out you signed it as such... but you better be ready to prove and show that you legitimately where under duress or the court won't accept your claim.
I'm inclined to believe this is a outlier to what normally happens and we're getting outraged over a mistake.

Every time I've visited my hospital for something, the privacy policy was printed on a small brochure and handed to me along with the signature form.
It is amazing, I agree. That said, it's an amazing product I can't use.

I need access when I'm not connected to the web, because I do most of this stuff when I'm on the Underground. It needs to sync up when I'm connected - and Asana doesn't support my phone.

It's a sign of the times - there is great (read AWESOME) and very usable tech out there these days, but it's reach is still severely limited - be that because of cost constraints, walled gardens or developer laziness, arrogance or ignorance.

So I end up writing this kind of software for myself. I end up with a tiny fraction of the features in exchange for reach.
"They're free to opt-out from that implicit contract by going to live elsewhere."

Is it your position that everything can be justified by a persons ability to get up and move?
I am heavy user of browsers and I have never noticed any difference in speed between Firefox, Chrome and for that matter IE in terms of my normal browsing. I usually have several browser windows open and sometimes over 100 tabs or more. Firefox wins hands down for its vastly superior tab handling and addon infrastructure.

Speed, for me, just has never been an issue.
My number one:

There are many more apologetic pro-corporation white knights here than I expected, and Miso is an organization to avoid.
Reading between the lines I was assuming the guy got fired for the screwup.
The Educator - Sir Ken Robinson
Exercises To Do With Your Baby
This entire article boils down to one sentence "According to trusted sources, Apple has an incredible headline feature in development for iOS 6: a completely in-house maps application."

The rest of it is speculation about what might exist.
This is honest to god one of the stupidest comments I've ever read anywhere. "Exploiting the proletariat?" Are you fucking kidding me?

I got a half semester worth of college credit for various internships and wouldn't have my current job (or subsequently my car or home) had I not had it.

Go back to Mother Russia and leave the thinking to the adults.
NFW.

I'd build a new machine from scratch, at a different datacenter, using pristine code and data from backups.

Once a machine has been in an adversary's possession, not even the data is safe.

That said, the FBI probably just imaged the drives. They're not as clueful/devious as many think they are.
Getting cp to give a progress bar like wget
Sure !! And well thats the confusing thing for me.

Every framework comes with some pros and cons and it is really tricky to decide which framework to go with.
If anyone is ever wondering why nerds never rule the world, this is a perfect example of why.

Pedantry is the brakes that the universe puts on the very smart to stop them acquiring too much power.
Given that the two of you are talking of this 3000-page policy as if it's real, it's definitely on-topic to reveal that it isn't. Condoning hyperbole is never good, but it is ironic to do so in the course of condemning unnecessary beaurocracy.

If you want to fix things, seek the truth before making decisions on obvious falsities.
So what? 100% of the information that makes Demo 1 different from Demo 2 lives inside that 4k. 0% of the creativity that makes demos actually inspiring lives in the OS or graphics drivers.
nerds do rule the world
What happens to apps that use MapKit?
Do you have a source for your first statement? Not that I'm implying you are lying. Certainly it's added as a mineral fortifier, but to protect the teeth of people unable to afford toothpaste? That is news to me.
They would probably provide caching, which is what the current map application does. Hopefully they will let you pre-cache areas, such as you can do in Android, but I doubt it. Anyway, no point speculating too much.
I can be amazingly stupid when sober, this is true, especially for the first 30 minutes after waking up. But to really screw things up there is normally booze involved.

As for consciously deciding to get drunk when sober, I normally decide to get tipsy. It is when I am tipsy that I decide to get absolutely hammered.

But then again according to statistics, drinkers live longer, have more sex and have higher IQs than teetotallers, plus for most of human history it was one of the few sources of clean water, so is not an entirely stupid activity.
How about spoken turn-by-turn navigation first so people can stop risking their lives and the peoples lives around them every time a turn is coming up?
And all I want is a decent Google Maps app on my iPhone. The Android map is so far above what iOS offers - having recently lost my Galaxy s2 to a freak elevator accident I thought I'd go back to iPhone for a while, and this was one of many shocks to the system. I'm approaching the feeling that the only things iPhone does better than Android (for my purposes) is store music and sync podcasts.
A better call: http://jzhwu.blogspot.com/2012/05/im-former-miso-engineer-an... Apparently they have decided to pay after all.
He did, in relating 'the story' on his website, which is why I phrased it that way.
I'm not an expert on contract law, but I'm fairly sure that one party modifying a contract without the other person's notice or consent does not make the modifications legally binding, which is why you do need to get the other party to initial changes you've made.

A contract is a physical expression legal agreement which both parties are supposed to know about, it's not a magical piece of paper which enforces whatever's written on it.

I should note that in this particular case the chances of any of this ever mattering are essentially zero. Just letting everyone know, in case they think they can go out, buy a house and move a decimal point in the sales contract while nobody's looking.
Essentially the damages on copyright are now approaching 'statutory' damages, and not punitive damages or portions of profits from infringement. This was a risk Oracle took when going to a jury trial, and now Judge Alsup will hold them to it.

On the patents side, clearly Google has not knowingly infringed - which would be treble damages. The court has also got expert reports which talk about how much the infringement's upper bound is.

So there is not much for the jury to do in terms of determining the actual damages to be paid out, since on the one hand they are statutory damages, and on the other there are only two patents still in play, and once the jury rules on the patents, the judge can determine the damages.
Same here. Is there a downside to this approach that I'm missing?
How publishers are leading HTML5 vs Native - with InMobi's Carnet Williams
Anyone taken the cloudera courses and can compare this to it? My employer is going to spring $2800 for a cloudera hadoop training. I wonder if it's worth it.
Projects are the new Job Interviews
Compare directly to the 64k IIe, then. $595 vs $1200, according to Wikipaedia.

Anyway, my point is not to take anything away from Apple or Jobs, but it's a stretch to say that they were so far ahead of everyone else. If you need a hero for rhetorical purposes, try Jack Tramiel :-)
I really don't care for Firefox's new versioning scheme. I'm still on Firefox 10 on Gentoo, and I don't feel much of a reason to upgrade. I felt that incrementing that number should be reserved for major changes. I didn't intend for this to be taken as a complaint about the Mozilla development team. It's just something I've found unusual in the development community. It's been confusing me, and I never understood their reasoning behind it.
Do you guys think this whole thing was maybe a publicity stunt?

And if it wasn't would this be a good, free way to drum up some interest in your company; spread some geek drama?
Exactly, I replaced Asana with Workflowy for this reason.

The other showstopper for me was that Asana's mobile site is almost unusable outside of a fast wi-fi connection. Workflowy is extremely usable from a phone even when I'm in an area with weak bandwidth. So I can take notes and start planning while in a meeting and they're on my screen when I get back to my desk.
JSaw - a digital audio workstation for the browser with Javascript
> working out number of golf balls in a bus doesnt show you how i would solve the problem of the database running slow

What about estimating how many I/O operations in a second the DB supports? You'd be surprised how many candidates out there lack basic arithmetic abilities.
Tumblr side project launched, today
Working demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19088947/JSaw/index.html
we don't know the size of the db involved. multi-gig dbs dumping every hour may be production-limiting.
I've always wondered about doing recruiting on the side. How does one get started? I guess you don't need a license or anything, but what officially makes one a recruiter?
Whats truth is that he was asked to sign on a document that said he agreed to clauses, he never read. And could be denied treatment for not lying.

Whether those clauses are 3000 pages long or 3 pages long isn't much of a concern here.
UX ≠ UI
I imagine it would just keep on working exactly the same, except that the map tiles will look slightly different.
Don't you mean "for non-tax-payers?"
Just look at his picture, and you will have your answer.
Here(Brazil) everything seems to work like that. You sign 200 pieces of paper each day and if you'd enforce everything you agree to in just one day, the legal system would halt.

Recently I tried to purchase a small stereo, one of those tiny little ones that just play radio and a CD. They demanded that I provide full personal information in order to give me my receipt. I know that demanding personal information in order to print a receit is illegal here. So I question the attendant. She says she can only print it with that data. So before I had a stroke, and after 15 minutes of stupid arguments, I go ahead and do what Stallman did: fill it with BS and negate the "I agree" thing at the end, signed it - bought the stereo.

That movie "Brazil" with the ridiculous 26bStroke6 form is not too far from reality now that I think of it.
Going it alone, for ego’s sake…
"I've seen too many good people (friends and students of mine) miss out on jobs simply because they failed these type of problems."

With this I would absolutely concur. I have more than a few friends who are smart, and who are rock-solid performers, but who just don't have a knack for brainteasers. I would hope than an interviewer is able to suss this out in an interview, i.e., make the determination that a person is great in every aspect, would probably be a great fit, but just happens to suck at puzzle questions. Sadly, I'm sure it's more often the rule than the exception that an interviewer will reflexively pass on someone who flubs a puzzle.

And I agree with you that puzzle questions require flexibility not only on the part of the interviewee, but also on the part of the interviewer. If you're just tossing out questions based on a book of canned puzzles, don't be surprised when you get canned responses. The exercise becomes entirely meaningless when that happens, and there's really no use in proceeding with it if it does.
Meh. I'll believe it when I see it. Apple already has an iPad Mini, only they call it an iPod Touch. It is more portable than a 7" tablet, cheaper to make and by most indications, they sold more of them over the holidays than amazon sold Kindle Fires.
The sky is not falling. In fact, if you look at the situation now, with real browser choice, IE declining market share, and with Android, then the situation is better than it has ever been. Most games consoles have opportunities to write software for them. Something you could only dream about in the 90s.

The market decides these things extremely well. We don't need people shouting and taking extremist positions.

The only thing that matters is "Does this device solve a problem I have, and satisfy my needs?". If the answer to that is yes, then I don't care how open/closed/walled garden it is.
This week in Scala (11/05/2012)
Anyone know any more details on what's actually different about the cycle collector?
ASK HN: Facebook Trending Articles shows article read by self
One thing i noticed about the feature is, it shows article read by me to myself. Do you guys think, it's necessary to share the same news with me which i have already read?
In what I have seen, it looks like he has been extremely fair, and is generally not ok with bullshit from either side. For a case that could have such big implications, its refreshing to see.
The problem being described is not .pyc files being pushed in the git repository. The problem is on the target server, the python runtime creates .pyc files for modules as they are imported/used, and if a deployment removes some .py files, you would be left with the .pyc file unless you take (simple) action to remove it during the deployment.
tl;dr = "Turns out people who've been doing this longer than us actually know what they're talking about"
Five Newborn Car Seats Under £100
Waze is decent and free and uses crowd-sourced map corrections.
Adam Yauch has passed (And why it matters to tech people, like me)
So your copy sucks?
Anecdotally I close my browser 5-10 times a day. It opens immediately so there's no reason to keep it open if you're done with your tasks. And having fewer programs open makes it easier for me to focus on my task at hand.
Inflatable vs non-inflatable isn't even a particularly meaningful distinction, in space. That just tells you what the station would look like if it were sitting in a warehouse on Earth.

In space, the station is filled with air, and the outside is filled with not-air. Take all the air out of the ISS and it'll stay rigid like a tin can. Take all the air out of a Bigelow station and it'll go all floppy. But who cares? If you ever get into a situation where you don't have ~1 atm inside and 0 atm outside you're screwed anyway.
To clarify, the issue isn't so much that it won't work at all, it's that you won't get good vide quality over a slower connection. For instance, I'm traveling for a week, and will have hotel wifi. Game of Thrones will look pixelated on my third-gen iPad. That's not exactly the kind of experience I'm looking for.

In contrast, I purchased the latest episode of Sherlock in 1080p for this trip. It looks amazing on the iPad, and I'll be able to watch it on the plane or anywhere else.

If this thread is still active, I'll report back tonight on how HBO Go works on my hotel's wifi. If HBO Go would just let me cache a few shows this wouldn't be an issue.

And forget about watching any of these episodes on my plane flight.

Maybe I'm asking too much from an app with Go in the name.
Chinese Physicists Smash Distance Record For Teleportation
Two points vacri,

1) The point of the story/article is "They asked me to lie" not "the length of a privacy policy was really long". If the privacy policy was only 1 page it still doesn't change the point of the article and story.

2) Richards recollection of the story states that the woman said it 3000 pages long (if true, probably to discourage Richard from following through with requesting it and actually reading it). Are you calling Richard a liar, or positively claiming his memory is wrong? Either way, it doesn't matter!

Focusing on the stated length of the privacy policy from a recollection of events about someone asking someone to lie is, in fact, irrelevant and off topic.
This is unrelated, but this reminds me of when my wife worked at a newspaper and her boss said that "The Internet is just a fad."

That thinking has worked out real well for newspapers.
"Best proof is Instagram founder Kevin Systrom."

Ouch. I hope we're not going to start saying that the extent of Instagram's success was planned and inevitable due to the great founders. Let's be honest, it's a great app, but they won the lottery. It's not every day a super-rich guy decides he needs your app, and is willing to stunningly overpay for it. (I'm sure Instagram would have jumped at $50 million if it was ever offered.)

I don't know Kevin Systrom. I'm sure he is as you say, a great 'sales and technical' entrepreneur. But Instagram's success in terms of their sales price is not reproducible. It's random. Like the lottery.
I took my time during the only closing I've been part of. Every time I worked with my bank, I'd find some small but meaningful mistake in the paperwork. So I didn't trust that closing documents would all be correct. The funny thing is, nobody seemed to mind because they seemed amused to have someone finally reading through the paperwork and asking interesting questions.
You could argue -- probably with varying degrees of success, but still -- that the puzzle question is an attempt at an IQ question. Certainly, there are vaguely similar questions of reasoning ability, numeracy, and pattern recognition on actual IQ tests.

Anyone who's taken one of the commonly accepted IQ tests will recall that it's full of sequential pattern matching, word-unscrambling, and so forth. And I realize that most here have probably not taken the LSAT for law school, but that test is essentially a string of interview-style brainteasers. (The LSAT was initially derived from IQ tests, though it should be said that this topic is not without considerable historical controversy).
By "the drug" you mean "all new drugs"? Because that's what I was asking about.
I usually ask beforehand for a copy of anything I'm expected to sign. If the other party refuses, I have no qualms with sitting, reading and inquiring as long as necessary.
I can share Puppet's two greatest weaknesses from my point of view (managing an AWS infrastructure of a few dozen servers):

- It handles dynamic host environments like AWS badly. Puppet's SSL infrastructure gets often confused when hostnames and IP addresses of servers change and you can't disable certificate checking completely, even if you don't need it. As a result, Puppet sometimes dies and can't continue until you manually resolve the certificate issue (usually by deleting the client certificate and letting it regenerate). This can be helped by using fixed certificate names, but I've still seen these problems occur and they shouldn't.

- The dependency based configuration model gets very hard to manage when you keep adding new features to servers over time. Unless you reinstall the server from scratch every now and then to test it, you're bound to make subtle mistakes in the dependencies. This will bite you the next time the server is being fully reinstalled (e.g. after EC2 instance termination), as Puppet needs to run multiple times to satisfy the dependencies and this will take hours (because it runs in 30 minute intervals).

Because of these problems, I've been considering switching to Chef for a while but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Had a similar scenario happen when giving blood a couple months ago. They suggested there were closing in half an hour, but insisted that I give blood anyway. They took blood samples checking iron levels and then brought me over to a desk to sign a consent form. They promptly brought out a 200 page binder, saying I was required to read it prior to signing the form.

I opened up the binder and started to read, but quickly realized it was humanly impossible to finish it the remaining time. Several other people sat down next to me planning to give blood, signing the form without even opening the binder. I figured OK well, they aren't required to read the binder, but simply agree to the terms.

What surprised me, was that a lady taking blood, promptly walked over and said skip the binder.

I understand the desire to maximum blood taken from volunteers, but something is seriously wrong, when the people taking blood encourage and purposely take blood knowing there isn't enough time for the full required procedure to be preformed.
Does it really matter though? It's an arbitrary number, and incrementing the major version just sets a clearer goal for each release cycle.
The pattern that I've seen fairly often (and use myself) is to git pull into a "working copy" on the deployment target, but do a git archive/symlink to actually build the copy that's served (before doing the service restart).

That gives you a more atomic process and several points to back out gracefully if something goes wrong, without having to worry about *.pyc files or any similar cruft.