skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many people have looked at this copy function and thought that it is not defective. They claim that, as long as it's used correctly, it is correct. One person even went so far as to say, "It's not defective, it's just unsafe." Odd, since I'm sure this person wouldn't get into a car if the manufacturer said, "Our car is not defective, it's just unsafe."

Sorry, but the logic of this statement is 100% wrong.

Car seatbelts are intended for people above a certain weight, maybe 60 lbs. If you place a baby in a seatbelt, and you get into a car accident, the baby will likely die. Does that make a car seat belt "defective"? No, it doesn't. It means that the seat belt was used in an improper way.

The code is not defective, it's just unsafe. If you use the copy function in an improper way, you will likely get a crash. The implicit rules of the function are that the inputs are NULL-terminated strings, of a limited size. If you don't follow the rules, then you could very likely get bad behavior.

To call the copy code "defective" is completely wrong.
Mmm... generally speaking, I'm an ESR fan, but I think he's a bit wrong (and a bit right here. What I mean is, yes, RMS almost certainly is a fanatic. I doubt RMS himself would disagree with that characterization (although I don't know him and have never asked him; so it's just a hunch). But, the question is, is RMS harmful to the F/OSS culture (to the extent that one can talk about any sort of homogeneous "F/OSS culture")? On this point, I'm unconvinced.

In fact, I'll argue that, whether despite his fanaticism or because of it, RMS has been - and remains - a positive influence on the F/OSS world. No, his position and his rantings aren't for everyone but they are for some and to the some who are deeply inspired by his actions, the "RMS as messianic figure" thing is probably very valuable. And considering their are fanatics on the "opposing team" (if you will), like certain people who refer to the GPL as communist, I believe a certain measure of fanaticism is good, in terms of counter-balancing the opposing fanaticism.

The mainstream of culture itself will likely always hang somewhere in the middle. But one has to wonder where things would wind up without Stallman and the FSF proselytizing so strenuously for Free Software.
They do? The last time I read a lease mentioning an insurance was only to pay a hotel in case of fire/flooding, anything else you are on your own.
If anything, it seems likely to become less creepy. There are a generation of teenagers for whom being able to look into friends-of-friends' lives has always been normal.
The Lead-Up to WWDC
What advantages in life does having a certificate yield? Would an employer really care if I had this certificate vs if I learned it on my own?
The dumbing-down of Windows 8
Here in Portland we have a group called Code'n'Splode that takes women who are already working as engineers and gives them an opportunity to sound off on [gender] issues they've had in the workplace as well as coach other women interested in learning programming every week. If and when I ever delve into that world, I would feel a lot more comfortable going to them than even my close male colleagues if only because I know I can go to them about issues men might not have or - as a lot of HN articles have shown me - just don't think exist.

I'm not trying to generalize, but in my years of working with male developers, they tend to have a much more hands-off and "just look at it and learn" approach. Whether this is because I am female (and therefore a 'lost cause') or because they are just not the teaching type, I'm not sure, but when I'm trying to learn something, I don't want to take the chance of dealing with Daves or people that think women giggling equates to their being a bimbo.
Frag - A fluid, responsive, friendly, simple grid system
The IDF official Facebook page posts a gay couple holding hands
There is plentiful demand for 'effective government,' and a total lack of consensus on what it means.

In politics, 'effective' really means 'does what I want.' When there is a lot of conflict about what people want, the government is not 'effective' because (A) deadlock is frustrating and (B) yelling louder is a way to get more and intimidate the opposition.

A government is less like a "singular intelligent self-modifying system" and more like a war on controlled burn.
I'm sure it's possible, and that someone has sat down and done the mathematics, and figured out that it's just not worthwhile.

The most efficient way to do it is to use solar thermal, not solar electric, power -- build a huge array of mirrors to focus on heaters which boil your water and distill it out. But it's not really "free" -- you need a lot of land, a lot of mirrors, and a staff of people who keep the mirrors clean and replace the broken ones.

Oh, what the hell, I'll do the maths myself. To heat up and boil one litre of water from 20 degrees C takes 2.6 million joules. Sunlight, on a sunny day, is one kilowatt per square metre; let's generously assume we can get 50% efficiency over the eight hours of the day when the sun is high in the sky [don't forget, this is solar thermal power, it's more efficient than photovoltaics]. So each square metre of collecting area in our plant can boil 5.5 litres of water per day. The desal plant in this article produces 27.5 million gallons per day so to replace it with solar we'd need nineteen million square metres, or nineteen square km, of mirrors. That's a lot of mirrors, and a lot of squeegee men.

If you wanted a solar-powered desal plant I'm sure you could do it cheaper using photovoltaics plus reverse osmosis.
You act like they degined it that way. In reality german was more or less forced into the Euro.
Modeling Barn Owls to make ultra precise localization systems
I found ESR's comment interesting: ">In setting this stance, we push the Overton window further to our side, allowing pragmatists to be able to say, “We’re not extremists, like Stallman” and gain more credibility.

This is actually reasonable. I’ve used Stallman this way myself – he more or less begs for it. But I don’t think you’re answering the usual intent of the claim “the moral viewpoint is essential”, which has nothing to do with anything as cold-blooded as gaming the Overton window and everything to do with deep-seated convictions in the speaker."
It's not x86. ARM11.
From Idea to $5MM in Funding; Build a Lead Generation Site: SeniorHomes.com
In general, the people who have 2nd vacation homes buy single family houses or condominium apartments. They don't rent, because that doesn't get them ownership of anything. The 2nd home is generally a more speculative investment than anything else.

So no, they're not really pushing up the costs of rental apartments, because they're not in that market segment at all.
Three months ago, four women decided to start a coding school, and here it is
What hypocrites. They don't want to return the data, don't want to be sued at the same time, and even try to redirect the claim to those who can't return it. Are they just dumb, or utterly cynical to the point of mocking the public?
FWIW, CSS is a bad trip and XML does leave me drained and burnt out.
Obsessive thought in a psychological sense is often a symptom of anxiety. The intense focus of the obsession may be completely unrelated to the source of anxiety. Often a compulsive behavior provides relief for the anxiety, without, of course, ever addressing the root anxiety.
It Is 2012 and Pregnant Women are Still Discriminated Against by VCs
Pieceable is acquired by Facebook
Agreed. I've backed out of the job application process for a company rather than give a reference at my current employer before a written offer was on the table. What if I burn the bridges with people at my company, and then I don't like the offer presented by the hiring company?
but he is a negative influence on getting people, and especially companies, to adopt FOSS in the first place.

Is he really though? I mean, superficially one might assume such a thing about a lightning-rod figure like rms, but is there any actual evidence of this? And, if there is, is there actually any way to quantify this effect and weight it against the positive effect he has?

I can't prove my case either, but I still believe that - on balance - rms is a positive influence. Note that I'm not saying I agree with him on everything... I'm no Stallman acolyte or anything. I just think esr is overstating the case for any damage done by rms.
Why not return a 301 so this service could be used directly by web browsers?
Lessons learned from investigative crowdsourcing project GuttenPlag
OK, but you have to acknowledge that businessmen and engineers are not the only people who could be interested in FOSS.

I work regularly with social scientists; they are really interested in Free Software and don't care much about Open Source. You can talk about efficiency and reduction of cost endlessly and to them it's just another "marketing speech" but if you talk about ethics and the well-being of society at large they are instantly hooked.

RMS is just a man, he can't be all things to all people. There are situations in which his rhetoric is really effective, and others in which it isn't; as simple as that. It's great to have Open Source to make an argument that businessmen will pay attention to. However, criticising the "Free Software guy" because he's not an "Open Source guy" is kind of pointless.

I think the diversity in points of view is a testament to the cultural importance of FOSS, and we should celebrate that.
Why MongoDB? It's the developers ...
Are you familiar with his views about Islam or Homosexuality? Those seem pretty fanatical to me, they are completely biased and downright offensive and illiterate. He equates homosexuality with paedophilia, denies HIV is the sole cause of AIDS and believes in a conspiracy to hide the true causes, and calls for the murder of religious leaders of the middle east equating them with animals. I tried multiple times to discuss this theories with him, but he called me a "marxist anti-american fag" (sic), a label that even if undisputed gives him no logical arguments against any refutation of his bizarre theories nor justifies his calls for action or even sometimes genocide.

For some time already his mind has been drifting in a sea of obscurantist choosing of statistics and a convenient selection of right-winged american-exceptionalist conspiracy theories.

I could link to his twisted essays, but although biased the entry in Rational Wiki about him sums most of the hard facts, though I suggest you ignore their opinion and go read the compiled cited writing of ESR. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
WWDC 2012 Live Blog
Please don't refer to that NYT article as "data" (noun: Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis). The it-must-have-been-us presumptive mentality despite the absolute lack of concrete evidence bothers me to the point of contempt.
The Euro is like a gold standard. If you are doing good and somebody else does not its not the golds fault.

I think the ECB did some not so good things and I think inflation targeting is a idiotic policy but I dont really want to blame the ECB for any of this.

To blame are the institution of the country (and whoever is at fault for the housing bubble but I dont want to get into that).

Spain would have been hit hard by the bubble anyways but it was unreactiv government that let its spending get out of hand.
Tell The White House To Stop Illegally Seizing & Shutting Down Websites
New jQuery Mobile Book - Learn how to build an app
The iPhone also uses Corning Gorilla Glass.

(Not only has the iPhone always used it, not only was it the first phone to ever use it, Steve Jobs was the one who convinced Corning to invent the stuff, if his biography is to be believed.)
Meh. It's the software engineers making $150,000 each bidding up the cost of apartments more than it is J Random Tourist-Supplemented Income dude.
> the government shuld have reacted and cut spending (or collecting more taxes).

Any economist will tell you that the worst time to do that is in the midst of a horrible economic slump.
Take a 5 minute break, courtesy of SiteSimon
How'd that happen? Why didn't it happen to the UK? Or Denmark?
Everything's negotiable... (at least, it better be...)
Smart guys. :-) Would love an update if you remember.

Thanks!
Starting Now - WWDC Live Coverage Right Here
Harvard's CS50 (cs50.net) is an introductory computer science course that teaches C. Full course (lecture videos + problem sets) is available free online.
Why C Is a Great Language
Alexander Stepanov, the primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library (STL), gave an interview to Dr.Dobb's Journal back in 1995, sharing his insightful view on 'why C is a great language' (http://www.stepanovpapers.com/drdobbs-interview.html):

"Let's consider now why C is a great language. It is commonly believed that C is a hack which was successful because Unix was written in it. I disagree. Over a long period of time computer architectures evolved, not because of some clever people figuring how to evolve architectures---as a matter of fact, clever people were pushing tagged architectures during that period of time---but because of the demands of different programmers to solve real problems. Computers that were able to deal just with numbers evolved into computers with byte-addressable memory, flat address spaces, and pointers. This was a natural evolution reflecting the growing set of problems that people were solving. C, reflecting the genius of Dennis Ritchie, provided a minimal model of the computer that had evolved over 30 years. C was not a quick hack. As computers evolved to handle all kinds of problems, C, being the minimal model of such a computer, became a very powerful language to solve all kinds of problems in different domains very effectively. This is the secret of C's portability: it is the best representation of an abstract computer that we have. Of course, the abstraction is done over the set of real computers, not some imaginary computational devices. Moreover, people could understand the machine model behind C. It is much easier for an average engineer to understand the machine model behind C than the machine model behind Ada or even Scheme. C succeeded because it was doing the right thing, not because of AT&T promoting it or Unix being written with it."
I find that comment (and the comment he's replying to) more interesting than anything in the post itself.
Depends what your impurities are. If you have a lot of other liquids mixed in (oil , organic solvents etc) then distillation can be easier - it also lets you separate them for disposal.

Small scale pure 'distilled' water eg. for battery top-up, is typically made by ion-exchange resin - it's more effective than osmosis for removing very small amounts of inorganics and cheaper than actual distilling if you are starting with fresh water.
While I'm sure we have different definitions of "superficial understanding" one thing I've noticed as I've gotten more interested in ML/datamining during the final stages of my master's in CS is that solving real world problems with these techniques is often a very different experience than deeply understanding the theory behind them.

For example I couldn't implement an SVM library from scratch to save my life, but I do understand what it means to be a 'maximum margin' classifier, from a high level how the 'kernel trick' works, and why you would tune regularization and cost parameters. However this knowledge has been enough to help me in quite a few interesting problems.

Reading accounts of how others have solved real world data mining issues it's amazing how often a very simple model will do the job, and also how often, even among more serious researches, there's a bit of intuition in finding the right combination of parameters, and lots of trial and error in searching for which model/blend of models really does the job.

I think there's a lot of room for more people approaching data mining with the 'hacker' mentality. Sure you don't want 'data scientists' using a randomForest whose eyes glaze over when you mention the word "ensemble", or someone who couldn't explain in plain terms what a "maximum margin hyperplane" is. But, there is a growing space for practitioners in this space, that aren't necessarily as strong in the theory as people working in the pure research space.
Single-finger swipe from the bottom won't work well, as your fingers hang out down there much too often; you'd be triggering it accidentally all the time. Using the keyboard, for example, would be tedious. If the bottom were a hot zone, it would have to be triggered by multiple fingers, which is awkward on a small phone screen.
To be honest , most people don't even know who RMS is and that includes people who work in IT (and many people who use Linux for a living).
This... there was also a recent NYT article about how new workers moving to SF are displacing existing residents by competing for apartment rentals. Having thousands of new residents moving into a city should be viewed as an opportunity, not a problem, especially considering the budget issues out here. SF needs to stop obstructing new construction and allow for more vertical residential housing like New York and other space-constrained cities. Even if those apartments mostly go to yuppies, it will take pressure off the overall housing market.
That's not a computer that's a cardboard box. It would probably be more effective to show a rendering + screen shots. They're not selling a box they're selling a computer.
Also http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00528.html (but that's just some internal governance tool)
> Just use the right tools in the first place.

There are two reasons to ask the question.

The first reason is because the questioner is looking for an excuse to use something different. In this case, your answer is the right answer.

The second reason is because the questioner wants to learn more about how cryptography works, for educational value. In this case, your answer is not helpful.
The most fascinating part of this for me was the fact it looks like Flame was developed prior to Stuxnet. Not the other way around as most people believed.
There's also a "Learn Python The Hard Way" course: http://www.udemy.com/learn-python-the-hard-way/
Learn Python the Hard Way is great, although I can't say I've read that many Python books, but I though his approach was a very good way to learn Python.
It probably doesn't actually cost $49 dollars is why.
Well for danes it would mean computer science. In 1966 Peter Naur coined the word datalogi (data-logy) which has since been used in danish for the subject computer science.
At the time of this writing, yours is the most insightful comment posted here. Also, I'm pretty sure that both RMS and ESR would consider it a decent summary of their disagreement, which is unusual in discussions about this subject.
I don't think that argument is really going to hold up against Apples legal team.
When you're doing it 100 times? Sure.
For me, I'm wondering if I'm learning the right material. If I self teach, how do I really know if I'm doing this right unless I get feedback? Also, many hiring managers might not recognize self-taught expertise. I might not want to work for those managers, but unfortunately, this includes a very large swath of potential jobs.

Of course, I wonder if this certificate gets me anywhere as far as employment goes.
Anybody else find something unsettlingly sycophantic (towards Apple) about this kind of thing?
Something about this just doesn't seem legitimate.

Also, in the fine print at the bottom:

"The images on this website are examples only. Actual products may not contain the same design or functionality as featured on this website. "
The interview is from 1995 ... you should probably mention this in the title of your link.
Facebook's Privacy Problem Is Going to Kill Them
The only useful application for this I'd say is if something in your old PC died, and instead of buying parts for it, you could buy this, and make it live longer.
Because the chapter you linked to is so terribly incomplete, it's unlikely that the present discussion will be any more enlightening than the other discussions.

Why don't you summarize and extend those earlier discussions in your own post, and link to that?
I don't like the links you posted. It would be much better to find headlines which can be answered "NO" but, according to the text are answered "yes".
Solution: delegate authentication to experts - use OpenID.
Accusing other of not knowing macro 101 and then writting such an unreflectiv post (im nice in not just saying wrong). Bravo.
That is, "it's the user's fault for trusting me/us."

No, it's the user's fault for trusting any given site more than necessary. People outraged that LinkedIn leaked the same credentials that they use for PayPal, for instance. That is ABSOLUTELY a user issue. LinkedIn, and many before, screwed up. People aren't upset as much about the root screwup though (I mean just reset your password and move on), but that, yet again, it reveals that people rashly and irresponsibly reuse credentials en masse.

Your analogies -- if we accept that software should be built like a bridge (which is ridiculous) -- is misplaced. LinkedIn, like a bridge, should be built well to the limits of its purpose. If a bridge has a defect, however, it shouldn't cause my house to fall down as a consequence.
I have chronic back problems (lumbar) and I've tried dozens of chairs over the past few years from periods between a few hours and a few weeks and I've only found 2 which haven't caused me problems:

Herman Miller Aeron (which I currently use)
Steelcase Leap Char (which I used at my previous 2 jobs)

The price for these chairs are high. But given I'm relatively healthy and productive with them, its well worth it.
(Your second number is off -- it's 2,260 kJ/kg or 2,260,000 J/kg)

There's no therodynamic objection that you can't recover (virtually) all the heat you spent creating steam, when the steam is recondensed back to water. Which is what they do. Distillation methods (multi-stage flash (MSF), multiple effect (MED)) "only" use around 200-400 kJ/kg of heat per water output.

http://www.desware.net/desa4.aspx

Some perspective: at $4/thousand cubic feet natural gas (US of course), this is a heating cost of $0.75-$1.50/cubic meter of desalinated water. High, but not impossible.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_nus_m.htm
upvote for humour.
It's inconsistent that is what it is.
It's a bit like claiming memcpy() is bugged because it can crash your program. Well, true, it is good style to program defensively against memory corruptions, buffer overflows etc, and in that respect K&R may teach students bad habits.

I think it's a bit much to say that it should never have been written like that, as at the time people knew so much less about building complex projects, sources of error and defensive programming.

Keeping a book up to date takes a lot of effort, as I'm sure Zed (npi) appreciates. It's an old book, it has warts. As you stated, the density of information was what many people like about the book, so any replacement for it will have to replicate that. I don't think the criticism is unfounded though.
Arguing about faults here doesn't help. It appears that Greece has the bigger faults (but they're already paying a lot for them). But I would gladly save them to save us all.
They're email has bad wording then: "APC can be shipped worldwide at a price of $49."

I tried peordering just after I got the email but they were already out of stock supposedly.
Could you provide an example of something that is worse on Android that doesn't depend on your preference?
I moved from an iPhone to an Android almost a year ago and found the Android OS and most of the apps much easier to use than on my iPhone (knowing where to find settings for different apps was a big thing). That doesn't mean that Android is better than iOS, it just means that I prefer it.
Ubuntu for Android does this.
U.S. Govt: Megaupload Users Should Sue Megaupload