skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My data says "usually, but not always":

http://roboprogs.com/devel/2009.12.html

I suppose I need to update this on newer machines (e.g. - 6 core AMD box I have now, for starters, instead of an old Pentium-D), and it's certainly possible I FUBARed the Java implementation. If anybody thinks they can clean up the Java, so that the single-threaded performance is better, here it is:

https://github.com/roboprog/mp_bench

I got similar results, albeit with much older versions of Perl and Java, about 10 years ago on sample code I made to index a flat-file in Perl and Java. That code belonged to my then employer, so I don't have it.
Lovely nod to the conspiracy nuts by specifying this pic as being taken in New Mexico!
To this I retort with Steven Fry's piece on language pedantry:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
nkoren: you are very careful ;)

Thanks for the comment, but I really did not have source materials to recreate this mountain
To be fair, he did write a book on programming languages and he knows a lot about the subject. He might troll a little but IMO it's always enlightened trolling.

In this case, he points out a corner case that the Haskell community already knew about. But I, a beginner haskeller, didn't.

It's a much higher level of discourse than the typical "Haskell is {only for academics, not suitable for applications that need to handle mutable state, right-wing}" that people like to throw around.
It's kind of hard to drive helicopters down the highway.
The Mystery of the Encrypted Gauss Payload
Because they're completely different things.
2 months back my 13-year old nephew flew from USA to India as an unaccompanied minor in Lufthansa, with a flight changeover in Frankfurt. This is a 21 hour journey. It went off without a hitch. In fact, Lufthansa staff took good care of him, and he had a great time.
Isn't there some link between techcrunch, y-combo, and HN?
Good use of 101 bytes! I'm attracted to it.
You mean spin-off company? Suitable is developing the Texai robot into a product.
Great. It's just a shame about the boneheaded "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE". It makes you look like a complete idiot.
I wasn't talking about just Germany. The OP's point was - why can't they just throw money at any country.
There are a ton of reasons for me not to like Java but on top of it all it's how it clings to "object oriented niceness" in utterly stupid ways. It shoves its paradigm down your throat and there's nothing you can do about it. Starting with "You can't even have a Hello World program without a class" and eclipsing in the horrid madness that is the Java Standard Library.

Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for OOP as well as for GoF design patterns but overdoing it is - I think - really bad design. Java tries to force you to adapt to this, while for certain tasks a different approach is clearly superior. Some programs benefit hugely from being written in a functional style, others benefit from having purely imperative modules that are not part of a class hierarchy. Java doesn't do any of that and makes it look like a good thing.

Again, I don't condemn the idea of OOP, I condemn sticking too closely to one paradigm. C++ is a horrible language in many ways but I still prefer it to Java by miles. Because it's multi-paradigm. Python - multi-paradigm. Heck, even C99 is multi-paradigm in a way (assuming you dive deeply enough into it, one can actually write OOP code as well [1]).

</rant>

[1] www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf
I have met experienced programmers that keep code simple enough, and be kind to their future selves when things need to be developed.

Often with inexperienced developers they go through the extremes of overly complicating a solution, or overly simplifying it.

The middle way, I'd say is more architecting enough of the inner workings of the system, and only building out the bare essentials of it, leaving room to grow.

Is this post relevant to MVP's? :)
This shouldn't be on HN. Flagged.
> The Patriot Reauthorization Act of 2005 modified some of the gag order provisions. An NSL recipient may now disclose the fact that they received an NSL in connection with seeking legal advice or complying with the NSL. NSL recipients were also given the ability to challenge, in federal court, compliance with the NSL and the gag order provisions.

http://epic.org/privacy/nsl/
Eh, I think people reading Robert Harper's blog can be expected to know that Robert Harper wrote The Definition of Standard ML.
I don't believe MacGyver vs. Careful Designer is a strict dichotomy of anti-pattern vs. pattern. Instead, they are both valuable approaches when used with proper judgment at the right times. For example, the MacGyver approach is appropriate when making a proof of concept or prototype. Once the project goes from breadboard to a real device, you use more Careful Designer patterns.

If you're doing messy work, lay out a tarp rather than labeling all messy work as an anti-pattern.
You know, there is a merit to balancing descriptions between technical and understandable to the uninformed. That doesn't mean every post has to explain what a monad is or the ideology behind NoSQL vs SQL, but you can't just assume everyone knows something, or even where to search for to figure it out. Dropping keywords and giving sources I think helps a lot towards this.

Maybe to eliben, this is all second nature, so he's never understood the point of such a post? Or perhaps it's completely foreign to him...

Meh, "Explain Like I'm 5 (eli5)" is a great idea, I think. Even better if you also give links to more professional explanations as well.
Not really.

The criticisms could be absolutely correct, but the response doesn't "reason" anything.

The response doesn't actually demonstrate that the parent is incorrect or propose a complete alternative. It simply states that it is wrong without a shred of evidence or exposition, only vague phrases suggesting omissions.

That's not an indictment, just a wordy insult.

---

I get the frustration with what appears to be shallow understanding of something turned into a sweeping judgement, but at least it's attempting something constructive. The response is pure aggressive arrogance.
I'm fairly confident you mean "The Transparent Society", which happens to be one of my all time favorites.

While its true Brin advocates giving up the illusion of privacy and (especially poignantly) that we should stop screwing around pretending identity keys are secrets, he does so in a framework that we should each individually own and control our identities, a position which seems to me antithetical to the noxious "we own your identity and can screw with you at will" approach Facebook has taken.

I hate that Facebook captured the social space.
Yes, I understand your point -- colloquially, one might say that the "child was lost".

Your mileage may vary, but when someone who works for a company has done something horribly wrong and I'm trying to clean it up, I often find it helpful to be careful with my language so that I can express precisely and correctly what it is that they did wrong.

This is mostly a matter of showing empathy, not being a stickler for technical correctness. When I talk to someone who can fix a horrible mistake, and I show that I understand precisely what went wrong and who's responsible without overreaching, I gain credibility and the person I'm talking to (who is after all a person, if perhaps one who has done something horrible) is more likely to believe that I understand them. If I can express that I know exactly how their system works and what part of it broke, it helps them realize that I'm seeing things from their point of view, and this can help bridge the gap between "my side" and "their side" to help them realize that we're trying to get the same thing done.

I've found empirically that practicing empathy with people makes them more likely to try harder to fix mistakes and gets better outcomes. It also saves a lot of time to be able to say "X happened", which is exactly what happened, and not waste anyone's time re-explaining the problem instead of fixing it.

But, again, this is just a thing that's worked for me in practice (as it happens, mostly with airlines). Concise, precise communication about what went wrong, who's responsible, and what I'd like to fix the problem has helped me get great outcomes dozens of times.
Like everyone who is clicking the link on the front page of Hacker News right now?
Beating Google Two-Factor Authentication with App Specific Passwords.
ACLU challenged it in two cases and that aspect was ruled unconstitutional in both. The law was changed in 2005 to explicitly state that the gag order does not stop you from talking to lawyers about the NSL.
Now the editor's kitchen sink also includes phone calls!
Sugar, sugar, or how we’re digging our own graves bite by bite.
I don't think it takes a lot of wealth either. It just takes enough wealth to meet those low-level needs.

A lot of people spend a lot of their money on things that do not contribute to their overall quality of life and happiness. We can do with less if we are not interested in one-upping everyone else. A simple car (and only one if possible), a simple apartment in a safe community, basic food, etc. don't take a lot of wealth to maintain. What is required though, as the original author points out, is changing the expectations we have in life.

Why replace a working stove? Why is it that important that you have a new one? When I rented out my house, yes we replaced the stove but that was because the oven heating element had failed, and it had other problems. We felt that the move to a self-cleaning oven would be a good thing for the renters.

Do more with less, and the rest takes care of itself.
I think in Harper's case he really does believe SML does it The Right Way, rather than promoting SML for ulterior/career reasons. His opinion on that subject isn't shared by many, but I think it's a genuinely held opinion. He just has very particular views on how type systems should be, and tends to overstate his views (e.g. treating questions reasonable people can disagree over as if he were stating unarguable facts).
What constitutes "hot" at such a small scale?

Years ago I addressed "hot" in terms of molecular speed, applying relativistic limits, calculating an upper limit on temperature and finding a large, but not inconceivable, maximum. Alas I've lost the paper (which was probably wrong anyway, but it was a fun exercise). The question has long bugged me: is there a real upper limit on temperature?
Try "Calculus Made Easy" (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf) -- it was Richard Feynman's first calculus book, and it explains things in a way unlike any other book.

Here is a famous quote where he references a passage from the book's prologue:

"Right. I don't believe in the idea that there are a few peculiar people capable of understanding math, and the rest of the world is normal. Math is a human discovery, and it's no more complicated than humans can understand. I had a calculus book once that said, 'What one fool can do, another can.' What we've been able to work out about nature may look abstract and threatening to someone who hasn't studied it, but it was fools who did it, and in the next generation, all the fools will understand it. There's a tendency to pomposity in all this, to make it deep and profound." -- Feynman, Omni 1979 (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FeynmanAlgorithm)
Scientific studies of fonts only 'miss the point' insofar as they don't find anything useful... for example, failing to find any real, consistent legibility difference depending on serifs.

If you are not just pleasing yourself whimsically, the point of fonts (like any other thing) is not just to do whatever you want, regardless of whether it is effective or not. Even in the realm of aesthetics. Unless those aesthetics are for my benefit only, I am probably trying to get SOMETHING done.

And unless the way it works is obvious (bearing in mind that many obvious things are actually untrue, and that many true things are not obvious)... it is reasonable to depend on research.

If my art tries to convey sadness but I am so out of touch on how to do that (comic sans) that my peers laugh at me instead, that is likely a failure. If I write a blog post meaning to persuade people to back up their data but rather make people feel content without backups (comic sans), I have failed. If I try to get attention for my product and am ignored because I used comic sans, I have failed.

On the other hand, if comic sans is beautiful to my audience, and if it works for my boss - I had better consider comic sans ;)

The reason we don't follow any recommendations, when we don't, isn't that actually finding things out is point-missing, but rather just that nothing has been found out (yet).
I think Windows RT/Windows 8 tablets have proper user accounts. Hopefully they will come with a guest account as well. Not sure if the new apps know how to deal with multiple users and their data.
On a side note: The ink blot does look like a bat.
There is no way Apple will pass on the revenue opportunity of making you buy more than one iPad per household buy not letting you have privacy with multiple accounts.
Paper is nice, it's disposable, shareable, etc :) .

However, the sticking point is the "lot of money" part, as many have pointed out, since tablets became mainstream it will have to compete with them.
Total bummer to see service delivery fail here.

You are logically correct. From the parent's point of view the initial impression was 'lost'.

They put the kid on the plane in one airport, she failed to show up at the destination. This was all the parents knew for several hours.

This kind of first impression is going to stick with a person, and it's going to be retold that way.
Bugs Spread Disease
Better headline: "Beat the TSA for under $300K".
This is the core premise of the article: "What we really need is an Open (Social) Protocol".

I've seen this a lot in regard to App.net. Before I go too far, I want to state my feelings about App.net... I don't have any strong feelings about App.net. I don't "get it", but I don't have any strong feelings. I don't care if Dalton wants to try something new. To the contrary, he gets points from me simply for the fact that he's trying something different. Back to the point.

The challenge of an "open social protocol" is the very nature of such a protocol. Open means anyone can use it. Open means commodity.

Email is a great example of an open, "commodity" (in the sense that it is interchangeable between providers) protocol. However, email was born at a time when commercial interests weren't paying full attention. The protocols that make up email were adopted in an environment where no one was lining up to monetize email users. AOL was an early attempt, and they almost succeeded, but by the time commercial interests fully arrived, email as an open protocol was already entrenched, and commercial interests have been trying to supplant it ever since.

Like it or not, an open social protocol will have to compete for users along side non-open protocols (like Facebook and Twitter). Yes, I'm abusing the term protocol here. Facebook and Twitter are not protocols, but this proposed open social protocol will compete with them. The issue is as clear as mud.

From the user's end, these wildly different technologies will compete head-to-head. When a user decides how they'll contact someone, they might decide to post on their Facebook wall, rather than email them. They're choosing a "closed" protocol over an open one, because the nature of the protocol doesn't matter to them.

When applications developed upon App.net enter the fray, they will compete in the same market, and will be judged by the same criteria. For users, email, Facebook, and Twitter are all free. You could consider that the annoyance of ads is a cost, but they're clearly a cost consumers are willing to pay.

App.net is in such uncharted territory that it's difficult to have a focused discussion around it. There are many open questions, some of which lie at the very core: what is App.net? If I have one strongly held opinion, it is that App.net faces some of the hardest challenges one could set themselves against.
WaveRider hypersonic jet targets Mach 6
Breakthrough Bags Seed Venture Capital Funding
how does this compare to stripe?
Groupon shares sink on poor results
Did they just totally ignore units in the whole article? (Yes, they did). Anyway, in the comments author said it's in degrees Celsius, if anyone was wondering (as at that scale the difference is quite big).
The difference between the retina and non-retina products is shocking once you're accustomed to the retina version.

If I pick up my wife's iPad 1 or my old iPod touch, it's like looking at a jumbotron. It's the first thing I see. "Ohh, a big clunky grid of pixels... I forgot!"

For now I haven't switched my computer screen, but I worry after a few weeks on a retina monitor, I'll have the same reaction to other displays.
Thanks for this - I've been through the golang wiki tutorial, but this (ab)use of an empty interface for storing "any"-type in a collection was a great idiom to be aware of.
I wouldn't have expected the sun to look so big on Mars.
And what were all of the costs associated with expanding to the UK? What's the ROI of simply setting up shop vs buying a company outright?

> the merchants aren't getting the same value

Groupon (much to the OP's point) is like every mindless American out there who thinks that you can simply copy and paste an American business model into any part of the world. The world does not simply work this way, but we (Americans) are brought up to think so.
oops... totally forgot about that gem. Now I just look like an idiot.
Yes on all three counts, so far at least.
They are quite awesome. I remember my childhood flights as well
It's really not worth licensing hassle for this amount of code.
My guess is that lese-majesty is already illegal in Malaysia. The issue as I understand it is that this changes the burden of proof and broadens responsibility for such crimes and this is the big issue.

Imagine if someone accessed your unsecured wireless network and downloaded child pornography, and that absent evidence that you never did it, that was considered sufficient evidence to convict. That's the concern I see on this web site and it is scary. I hope it doesn't pass.
Out of curiosity. How do they handle such heat? I mean won't it melt anything around it? Also, how did they measure it? [I am assuming it was measured using a sophisticated thermal imaging camera, though I would like to think that some brave soul stuck in a huge badass thermometer inside the cauldron =)]
Is it possible to accept wepay for merchants from another countries, e.g Russia?
Kludges are not necessarily an anti-pattern. Time is a constraint.

MacGyver put eggs in the Jeep's radiator because it had bullet holes, and the drug lord's minions had a helicopter.

A shipping minimum viable product held together with bailing wire isn't so bad - even if vaporware provides the ultimate ease of maintenance.
Sometimes it's best to let the argument stand on it's own merit, not on your name. --Publius.

Also, Karma doesn't matter, but sentiments that can be perceived as being anti-libertarian often result in Hell-Banning on this site, which is vaguely annoying.
Look at lowendbox.com and say that hosting Go is inconvenient again. Heroku and GAE are supporting Go too.
Subversion has no github because subversion can’t have a github.

Actually, it does have a github. It's called "github" and is available at http://github.com.

See https://github.com/blog/966-improved-subversion-client-suppo...
Very cool. Does it work with forms?
Education startup Educreations Raises $2.2M From Accel, NewSchools
You're underestimating bandwidth. You can't buy time, it's just not that easy. If it were, every start-up that raises millions would do it.

Hell, every listed company in the world would be global.
Bruce Schneier, An Avatar of Digital Distrust
If anyone is curious to see some picture of the vehicle they are here: http://www.terrafugia.com/photogallery.html

It looks a little fragile to perform well as a car. I imagine a significant pot hole might be enough to damage the skin. I understand the need to be light and aerodynamic so that it is flight-worthy, but this looks more like a toy then a real solution. It reminds me of those cars that can also perform as a boat -- they do neither well, their remarkable feature is that they do both.
The insurance plans I've seen were based upon historical data, and didn't take weather forecasts into account. (My family is in farming and ranching.)
Hacker News Redesign - Content More Consumable 
Some common-sense tweaks that would make HN way more usable. Vote up if you want a better UX on Hacker News!
Seems like it is not the case:
> You must be a US resident to accept payments.
It's really not worth dragging otherwise nifty code into the gutter with unnecessary obscenity.

"Public domain" would suffice. Yes, a significant percentage of the population does have a problem with needless obscenity.
I imagine that 'education' that most kids are forced to have to be considered as 'involuntary servitude', then. Age withstanding, even if you don't see them fit to make their own decisions.
Really? I have never heard that before. I have heard that it was going to be "Pearl" but there was something else out there with that name and so it ended up "Perl".

Interesting...
While that's true, the restriction is done in such a way that there'd be no sane way for most people to get their .emacs or equivalent loaded onto the thing, which would make such a port beyond useless. Android's far looser restrictions mean there should be no such issues there.
Yeah, I know the material is missing. Sorry if that came off critical of you -- your panorama is really truly gorgeous! I'm honestly feeling a bit petulant towards NASA for failing to include the mountain in their initial panoramas[1] -- they've missed 80% of the drama in that landscape! When they finally get around to imaging the mountain properly, I hope you patch that back into your panorama, because that'll be stunning.

[1] And yes, I'm well aware that in the litany of First World Problems, "Whaaaa, NASA landed a giant rover on Mars but didn't take exactly the photo I wanted" has got to be pretty high on the list...
How many times have I faced ridicule for spending more on computers than cars? Presumably others here are in the same boat.

They depreciate at similar rates and I spend much more time with computers.
It’s The Energy, Not The Time
Note: this is basically "a practical application of SSLstrip". Once you are capable of pulling that off, full control of the ssl-stripped site is a lesser concern. Interesting (and perhaps juicier as a media soundbite than "OMG SSLstrip exists!"), but not groundbreaking.
I seem to remember having a 30 minute bus ride to school through elementary school, and if I missed the bus, it was an hour's walk (though I could do it in about 10 minutes by bike if the swampy bit was mostly dry).

I guess I'm fortunate that my parents not only trusted me to do that, but encouraged it.

That said, I have a face for radio - they probably didn't think anyone in their right mind would even attempt to try and steal me...
Nice toy. Anyone know anything about its greenhouse emissions and/or full-lifecycle carbon footprint? A few stabs at keyword searches don't seem to bring up much on the topic.
Do college students need their own LinkedIn? AfterCollege thinks so
Steve Jobs' Home Burglarized
I'm glad your child got better. But you are falling for post hoc ergo propter hoc.

If this cure is so incredibly quick and awesome, it would be amazingly irresponsible for its proponents to not run a double-blind test.

Otherwise we just get into dueling anecdotes, like http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-autism-therapy-l...
Fair point, I would have assumed that even a long-haul flight isn't enough for that to really make any difference and therefore be a waste of a predator's time, but I'll bow to your experiences