skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Especially for a novice, formatting a field on a web form into a number, and seeing PHP format an empty field as zero, so you can carry on with your math, makes sense. "Oh, web parsing language, sees empty number field as zero, great!"

Principle of least surprise "for the novice web developer" says empty string to zero makes sense in this case.

Meanwhile, empty string with zero decimal places returning null would be less surprising to a pro, but in PHP, the first behavior would also be unsurprising to a pro.
Headline of this post is totally false and this is not even a bug in PHP, it's clearly a bug in the poster's code, so Rasmus response is right. If you actually try doing this in PHP you get this:

print number_format("",0);

Warning: number_format() expects parameter 1 to be
double, string given in Command line code on line 1

So the poster willfully ignored the warning. You can fix this simply by casting the first arg as a numeric type:

print number_format((int)"",0);
0

Please, if you're this bad at programming and you willfully ignore warnings, don't file bugs, and please do not take a programming job at some place that does important things like air traffic control, banking, or life support systems.
Oh, so that's why the SEC caught Bernie Madoff after being tipped off to his activities and before he could do major harm. Market experience.
Microsoft provides Windows and Office source code for Chinese government since 2003 as part of Microsoft Government Security Program.
Consequences of Living on a Sphere
Dude, this is HackerNews. I'm sure if you get on CarpenterNews you'll find just what you're looking for.
Would serving attachment previews from a separate domain, like fastmail-usercontent.fm, help?
Thank you for posting the cache link.
Oh please, 600 years?! The difference is the modernisation. 150 years ago in Sweden we had blasphemy laws not much better than Pakistan today.

But sure, you might come from some civilised place. :-)
Gotta love all these ditto heads doing the 'start your own business' chorus. 99% of all new businesses fail.

The 1% have been working very hard to pull up and destroy the ladders they used to get where they are.

In the current fascist economy there is simply no way 100 out of 100 people can all strike it rich. The handful at the top are busy cementing their position.

The game is rigged.
Click the link to apply:

http://www.f6s.com/springboardmobile2012#programs/ajax-appli...
When you consider SVG can be seen as an potential alternative to Flash for some projects, it is not hard to understand why manipulation through scripting is a desired feature.
> why does the function even accept strings

Because PHP was invented as a web language to process web forms and generally your inputs always came to you as a string.
Also, there is one thing about the title of this story that I do not understand. Why would a failed negotiation imply that "nvidia is losing face"?
Planetary Resources Kicking Around The Idea Of Crowd Funding
https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/70
This is pretty standard with large production software. You often see grids in the documentation, e.g. this version of the app server is only certified for these brands and versions of Java. Even if you have a paid support contract with us, do not contact us re using it on something else. So in the reporter's case, their software just isn't certified for the new version until updated. No big deal.

I remember working at a company where the servers were Ubuntu, the auto-update mechanism replaced Sun Java with OpenJDK which broke countless apps and web servers, like the Concur app, the build system, etc.. God that was a nightmare. A real setup like at bigger companies I've worked at would have tested that update on developer boxes, integration boxes, testing and training boxes, and only then sent it to production.
I'm not a Machine Learning / AI expert, so I have to ask: if running a neural network on 16,000 cores with a training set of 10 million objects isn't cutting edge research -- and if running "far larger" networks than this, as you say you have, also isn't cutting edge research -- then please tell me: what is cutting edge research?

I ask this question in all seriousness; I'd really like to know.

(And yes, I see that your username is that of a noted AI researcher. Who died in 2010. So if you're actually his beta simulation, then I'll indeed be rather impressed...)
Andhrareporter - The Tollywood Specialist
Well, there's that, and the fact that China is notorious for reverse engineering, and basically just stealing the technology and making their own knock-offs. I don't blame Nvidia for not giving them the source code.
Well yes and no actually. Projectors can't produce black (absence of colour) so they typically do so by increasing the contrast with respect to surrounding areas (that, and you turn the lights off). So to draw black text, you need to shine white around it.

But yes, in general you're right. If we draw text in blue for example, we should be able to get away with this. Again, more testing required... :-)
The Most Effective Time Management System
The stock android experience is amazing, and there are plenty of outstanding apps for the platform. However, I'm talking about setting and enforcing design standards. Android has yet to do that successfully.

Also, I said "can" tarnish the platform experience, not "will" or "did". Ask a professional designer to compare the general style and branding of the WP, Apple, and Android platforms. They will likely tell you that there is a clear cohesion between Apple apps.

Android ships on an incredible amount of phones because of availability. How many free iPhones do you get on activation? It's a cheap (and good) platform for a carrier and vendors to use. Thus, the volume of Android devices is high. Furthermore, volume shipped has almost nothing to do with usability. How many different vendors have created their own UI for Android?

P.S. I'm not an apple fanboy. I have a Droid X and a Kindle Fire, both rooted and toyed with various ROMs.
SipHash - A solution for hashDoS and short message MACs
33% (or slightly more) of homeowners have no mortgage at all.

Edit - Some sources:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/04/debunking-the-housing-r...

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/kfsneyqlidgb/rss2/
Can someone please explain senones to me? Can't find much on Google.

The article says that they are a fragment of a phoneme, but how small a fragment are we talking? 2-3 per phoneme, or many more?

Also - I'd be curious how much the phoneme in a word can vary based on accent.
I fully disagree when you say that if you want things to change you have to go to discuss this on SE. The entire point is that SE is not just "SE policies" and "SE moderators": SE is first and foremost users and these users have their right to read criticism about SE on HN / reddit / blogs / etc. And the day a topic shall pop-up on meta saying that some introspection from SE may be needed, the more users have read well-articulated blogs entries and great comments explaining what they find very wrong on SE, the more likely they are to upvote these suggestions on meta. You're not an island and you to realize your most important users have a very vocal voice outside of SE and that this voice does have an influence.
The revolving door was well in place before the recent financial crises.
Windows 8 is designed for touch devices. Using a UI that's designed for touch with a non-touch input SUCKS!

Do we need touch on a desktop or laptop? NO! I'll never touch my screen on a laptop or a desktop. It's tiring and clunky.

Do we need touch on tablets? Obviously.

Does everyone want a tablet? NO! I don't want one to do my main work on. I can't imagine I'm the only one here.

The problem is that microsoft is slowly transforming their main operating system and its application ecosystem to the touch-friendly metro-style.

So what's happening is ... MS is alienating their non-touch userbase. Which is now oooh ... let's say 99%?

I'll never feel comfortable using an interface designed for touch with a mouse & keyboard. And I'll never feel comfortable fondling a standing screen either from a laptop or desktop. So please don't force developers to develop for your touch ecosystem as I won't be using it.
Many experts have shown that hardware specs which are sufficient for writing drivers are entirely useless for making hardware, to someone already versed in the field.
> I also got into a significant amount of debt in order to get a degree to make me more "employable"

There lies the rub between many of us and higher education. Making you more employable is supposed to be a side-effect of college, not the end goal. I found that the people who went to school so that they could write down that they did so got exactly what the came for and not much more, while those of us who were there to learn got what we came for. It's an old idea, but true that what you get out of education depends on what you put into it.
Using a separate domain to display the attachments is a good idea. Gmail does it. It is mentioned towards the end of the blog post. However, that still doesn't get rid of the vulnerability, it just makes it less dangerous.

There should be a strict whitelist of allowed content types, and anything not on that list should be download only. The trouble is, people tend to put "image/*" on that list, because they don't know what an SVG is or what it can do.
With friends we do the same when we meet to LAN play. We copy the games into a USB stick and pass it around. It's waaaaay quicker than downloading from steam, and quicker than copying through the local net.

If you know the right folder you just copy it there, buy the game if you didn't already have it, and just wait a little for it to check the integrity of the install.

This article has me almost wishing to start a data courier service. Flying around the globe transporting data.
It was really to read that conversation. I do not care whether it was a good or bad decision to make those changes in PHP but you simply can not talk like that to a person who has put thousands of hours of unpaid work (while he could get a fat pay check easily) and you are making living because of what he has done. It's just immature.
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/tutorialconcepts

"Speech is a continuous audio stream where rather stable states mix with dynamically changed states. In this sequence of states, one can define more or less similar classes of sounds, or phones.

Words are understood to be built of phones, but this is certainly not true. The acoustic properties of a waveform corresponding to a phone can vary greatly depending on many factors - phone context, speaker, style of speech and so on. The so called coarticulation makes phones sound very different from their “canonical” representation. Next, since transitions between words are more informative than stable regions, developers often talk about diphones - parts of phones between two consecutive phones. Sometimes developers talk about subphonetic units - different substates of a phone. Often three or more regions of a different nature can easily be found.

The number three is easily explained. The first part of the phone depends on its preceding phone, the middle part is stable, and the next part depends on the subsequent phone. That's why there are often three states in a phone selected for HMM recognition.

Sometimes phones are considered in context. There are triphones or even quinphones. But note that unlike phones and diphones, they are matched with the same range in waveform as just phones. They just differ by name. That's why we prefer to call this object senone. A senone's dependence on context could be more complex than just left and right context. It can be a rather complex function defined by a decision tree, or in some other way."
Why founders should not hire a Product Manager
Will be interesting to see if this benefits the original game any later on. Maybe people will write Android games using it and contribute back the ability to the original, etc.. Or maybe they won't, etc..
> Human rights abuses against local people for dissent happen all around the world, including the US and the UK

OK, I'll bite: Who has been abused for dissenting in the US?
They missed Venetan[1].

It's considered vulnerable by UNESCO[2], but it's not even recognized as a language by the Italian governement (just by the Venetan region).

As almost all pre-unitarian Italic languages, it's not being thought, degraded as 'dialect' and is being discouraged as an idiom for ignorants.

There's a very ample discussion to make about these issues here in Italy. If anyone wants to know more, I'll try to answer. Here or in a more appropriate venue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetan_language

[2]http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas/en/atlasmap/la...
"Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off." - Spider Robinson
As others have mentioned, the idea that "freedom of speech" is a concept originating from and specific to the US Constitution is staggeringly ignorant, and the idea that freedom of speech can only be infringed by the government is too.

Freedom is about what the less powerful can do even when opposed by the more powerful. Money is one of the rawest forms of power in the modern world, and so if someone threatens to decrease your income significantly unless you change what you say, they are unambiguously flexing their power at you and impinging on your freedom of speech.
I tend to agree, these days where possible when working in PHP I try not to rely on PHPs magic type conversions behind the scenes for things like comparisons.
"I would just have chrome as the only browser anyone could use"

Comments like this sadden me, especially as I know so many feel the same way. Chrome is closed-source (though few people realise it) and gives far, far too much control to a company that only cares about the web so long as it can make money from it. If you want to use it, fine, but it's a shame that we're returning to an age where it's acceptable for websites to be designed (or 'optimised') for a specific browser.
Nationalisation: Uruguay's solution to its drug problem
Governments and Universities can already get access to Windows source. I think the difference is that China can write the source for Linux.
CI Simple
Pdf operations in Java (Creating, merging pdf)
> How does a arbitrarily chosen return value differ from a undefined behavior?

In it being defined, don't you think?

> Is "" -> 0 a standard conversion in PHP?

Erm... yes? `(float)""` returns that, `"" + ""` returns that, `0 + ""` returns that, and so do `intval('')`, `(int)''` or `floatval('')`. More generally, http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php#langu...:

> When a string is evaluated in a numeric context, the resulting value and type are determined as follows [...] The value is given by the initial portion of the string. If the string starts with valid numeric data, this will be the value used. Otherwise, the value will be 0 (zero).

> 0 is hardly the standard identity value.

0 remains the standard and defined numeric value of an arbitrary string not prefixed with numeric data in PHP.
At least the western countries don't build and finance terror networks to attack neighbours. And so on.

Are you serious?

"In Nicaragua, the National Guard was a militia and a gendarmerie created during the occupation of that country by the United States from 1909 to 1933. It became notorious for human rights abuses and corruption under the regime of the Somoza family."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_(Nicaragua)

"The United States' Joint Special Operations Command (JSOT) conducted training for the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian opposition group listed by the US as a terrorist organization, journalist Seymour Hersh claims."

http://www.rt.com/news/us-terrorist-mek-intelligence-747/

"Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government's radical example) to its allies in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujaheddin, as the "contra" force was known."

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a86operationc...

I'm sure you're aware that the mujahheddin became Al-Quaeda.

This is just the US, because that's where the majority of the posters on this site are from. You can easily find examples of the UK & France doing the same thing. "The western countries" hands are not clean.
Do you have any supporting references for thinking it is just funny that ISI et al support terror groups, mainly for use against India?

It is easy to infiltrate the militarised border to go into Indian Kashmir for the terrorists? The Pakistani military REALLY tries to stop the infiltrators...? :-)

And so on.

I'm not an expert, but I need good references or I'll think you're a troll or writing propaganda.
The headline of this post is such because it is quoting a PHP developer on a point made in a later comment on the report.
There's a language around my hometown that only about 250 people speak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwala

The community is doing a great job at keeping their language alive. A few of my friends took Kwak'wala classes in middle/high school.

Here's what the language sounds like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNECt4ViNjY
This happens every time CCP releases a new version. Perhaps not to this extent, but pretty much every time a new release shows up people get rich.

When I used to play, our corp had a subforum devoted to new and upcoming releases so we could figure out the best way to game it. There are several opportunities with each release:

1) Some game-breaking design flaw, such as the one illustrated in this article. CCP is notoriously bad at understanding the impact of changes on the in-game economy, especially when it comes to nullsec and obsessive nerds playing internet spreadsheets. These are obviously the best things to exploit

2) First mover advantage. In almost all new features added, there is a significant first mover advantage. The bigger/more complex the feature, the more money there is to make because it is more difficult for less organized individuals/corps to get into. For example, the wormhole mining and ratting needed considerable logistics to pull off profitably. We had 10-15 individuals working on the project. Everyone had specific roles - some ratted, some mined, some scouted, some dealt with logistics and some dealt with shipping and selling at the market. These exploits can make some pretty good money, and are pretty reliable

3) Scamming. Every new feature opens up new ways to scam people for the latest and greatest thing from CCP. You'd be surprised (or maybe not) about how lucrative this is

4) General income from the new feature, once it's swamped by <everyone else>. Which means margins are razor thin and you should probably look into the next big thing coming down the pipeline.
Awesome, I'm famous :-)
Even in America, we have a concept of freedom of speech that extends beyond the First Amendment. Obviously his Constitutional rights have not been abridged, but that doesn't mean that it's not a free speech issue.
related link: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/speechreco...
I suspect there never will be data, because there's too many variables (including developer skill levels), that measuring 'efficiency' of an editor is a pointless exercise.

I use vim sometimes locally, but almost exclusively remotely, because the context I'm in at the time precludes using 'real text editors' - GUI apps that get installed and have menus and such. If I have to deal with files on a remote box (example: to edit config files), pulling them down to edit in notepad is highly inefficient. Vim is far more efficient - my own data over the last 15 years proves that to me, and generally to other people who watch me, and I say that as someone who really disliked ssh/vim processes - I preferred to pull down files via FTP, edit, save, then FTP up. But efficiency won over after experimentation.

But that's just one context. I use intellij, phpstorm, zend studio and visual studio for different types of editing, and those editors provide a wealth of other tools that make my editing far more efficient in those contexts (development, debugging, creation, testing, etc).

So "vim efficiency data"... likely never to happen, but "eclipse efficiency data" or "emacs efficiency data" won't happen either.
What shocks me most is the sense of entitlement. They downloaded PHP, its behavior changes and they'd rather complain to those who changed it and annoy them until the thing works for them again than fix the bug in their code. If they are not happy with the free product and the free support, there are other options.

PHP has its shortcomings, but, as in any open source product, if it doesn't work for you, you have a couple options.
I said nothing of the sort.

Follow the thread UP, and you'll see it's the core of the conversation - as to whether one can live off of 6MM for the rest of your life. I call "ceasing working and living on the money you made previously" retirement, you can call it what you like.
The OVA was amazing. I just wish the TV series had been better.
How To Do Online Research (Like a Boss)
I'll just leave this here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Singapore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Thailand

You are right that religion != race, and for that I apologise. However, the anti-islam sentiment that I see tends to focus on those 'nasty brown people', which too unfortunately pakistanis get lumped into.
You think he started a search as a service company because he was targeting LinkedIn?

Flaptor (the name of the company, IndexTank was the product) was a search consulting company five years before becoming a startup. I know, I was there.
I've never played EVE for more than an hour. However, I always find these stories intriguing.

Due to the nature of EVE's player-driven economy, things like this can have a huge impact. In some ways, the value of the ISK could be negatively affected by this.
I agree. South Africa spends large amounts on education has a huge amount of human potential that is being wasted because of the dysfunctional public school system (I speak as an almost-victim of that system). I don't see the grip of SADTU (the largest teacher union, and indirectly aligned to the ruling party) being weakened, and I expect a few more generations of mediocrity, unless something radical is done.

Interestingly, we have had things like the Learning Channel for many years (think Khan Academy but on videotape, and starting in the late 1980's), but the copyright, now held by Avusa, a media company, makes it very expensive. The CC licenced Mindset Network doesn't strike me as being of comparabile quality.

With broadband penetration and open access to remote learning materials we could at least try to break the cycle of mediocrity caused by under-skilled teachers.
Ubuntu's Plans To Implement UEFI SecureBoot: No GRUB2
So where is my WinModem driver?
Node.js - much improved v0.8 almost ready
What makes Nokia Mobiles Asha Range so popular?
I do not think that there is anyone in Pakistan who has never used Nokia mobile phone. We all have used Nokia mobiles or are using them even now.
Have you ever wondered why Nokia mobiles are so successful in Pakistan as compared to other mobile brands such as Sony Ericsson Phone, HTC, or BlackBerry handset?
Pocket Folder Printing
Business card printing plays a key role in the success of your business because they are popularly known as a great asset which easily identifies you and your business in the market. Business cards are tool of extending and retaining contact with prospective clients and therefore should be designed effectively.
what kind of crazy country do you come from where < 60% literacy rate is acceptable?

Also, Urdu is the national language of Pakistan - so I would expect everyone to be able to write their name in that language.
Are you aware of "The Troubles", the 25-ish year campaign of insurrection carried out by Northern Irish separatists? I would suggest that's closer to "open warfare" than it is supporting a football team.