skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "send them a confirmation email" works well for registration, but there are legitimate use cases in which you don't want to do that.

When you just want to store the email address without acting on it (e.g., think a landing page for an app that hasn't been released), the best you can do is validate using a regex since sending them a confirmation email would provide no value to the user.
You know what else scientists aren't? A group that can be generalized about that easily. Are you seriously willing to put forth scientists 'can tell no lies'? Do you have any evidence to support this generalization?

As an earlier poster has said, being a scientist doesn't make you any less human and subject to everything that goes along with that - emotions, irrationality, ego, and so on.
"In one striking study researchers measured the children’s IQ and split them into High, Average, and Low groups. They reran the test offering the low group an M&M for every correct answer. As a result of this simple incentive, the low group’s score went from 79 to 97 – on par with the average group."

I always suspected that sufficient amounts of sugar could could transmogrify the borderline intellectually functioning brain of small children, leaving them hyperactive... but otherwise regular kids. Oh, wait... they got their buzz on after the second test!

What did the study demonstrate other than the fact that bored kids didn't want to expend any real effort to fill in their dots?

Motivation may dramatically affect the curve on the low end, among those that were previously making no effort. Talk about low hanging fruit. It takes really inspired management to get those kinds if performance gains out of people that are already reasonably smart and reasonably motivated. "What now?", indeed. 18 M&Ms?
Using five technical searches I might actually make on a day by day basis, I chose Google 4 times and a draw once, though the results were close almost every time (once I chose Google because I searched for an organization name and wanted their homepage first rather than relevant news, and twice because the relevant result was from MDN rather than MSDN or W3C since I found that MDN tends to be the best site for actual technical reference, so YMMV).
I think the point is that in reality the user should be protected from the service -- which may be trying to validate their input and telling them their perfectly valid email address (or address, postal code, name, password) cannot possibly exist.
Not all scientists are evolutionary biologists.
Increasingly you get led down an endless paper trail of showing documentation, code reviews & ccra is now in the business of sicking auditors on claims to aggressively deny them. Wasted time & headaches.
I can't stand when I try registering for a website with my email (which has ".com" in it... BEFORE the @ symbol) as invalid. I know it's a funky email to have, but it's valid and people often do these crazy checks.

I can see both sides though, on one hand you don't want someone accidently entering an invalid email and then never getting their email confirmation...
> In that sense, functions are on equal footing with values.

But function objects are not on equal footing with non-function objects. You can nest function objects or non-function objects inside other function/non-function objects, but at the root, you need an object that isn't a function.

At the end of the day, yes, you can do the same things, but my original point was that this doesn't make Scala functional: it makes Scala object-oriented (Java, by contrast, is not properly object-oriented, because it has four kinds that aren't objects).
Quantum-y interconnected telescopes see clearer
I wish web forms had a "Tell us we are wrong" button next to validated boxes.

You know... that's a very good idea actually.
Part of the problem is also that the compositor often can't know if the frontmost window (or any window, for that matter) is 100% opaque. If your window has partial transparency, or (for example) implements non-rectangularity by using an ARGB window and setting the alpha for some pixels to 0, then unredirecting it will break that.

I suppose you could just restrict the optimization to windows with an RGB visual, though. But then you need to make sure there isn't something else modifying the opacity of the window. I've written a standalone compositor before (that is, a compositor that runs independently of the window manager, as a separate process), so you can't always assume that the compositor "knows best"; for example, the WM may want to make the window decorations semi-transparent. Or maybe the user has specified slight transparency for all their windows. Or something.

Hmm... in the end, though, you could probably come up with a heuristic that works in most cases.
I don't think so. Java's chief virtues are simplicity (which is not the same thing as a lack of verbosity!) and safety with reasonably good performance.

Scala does not have anywhere near the simplicity of Java.

I think that something like Kotlin would be a much better Java++ - it adds lots of new features (many of which are in Scala) without the complexity. That is more likely to appeal to Java programmers.

That said, I don't see that the alternatives provide enough of a benefit over Java to make the jump worthwhile for the majority. If your chief metric is how cool your code is, then sure, people would have abandoned Java ages ago. If you measure you programming effort by productivity and results, then Java's still flying along just fine.
What Developers Mean: a Guide for Project Managers
There is some real validity to the points, especially with regards to the investor culture, but mostly because there are just far fewer of them. The good ones are out there, just not in the numbers.

Staying out of the fishbowl is definitely helpful, and we've found some great traction in a market that has far less competition. I can imagine anyone in our target in SF will have 100 people knocking on their door to get them involved in a beta.

Canada is a great little greenhouse, and a warm pond to test, iterate, and evolve. If you can prove your product/market fit here, then you can look at the big ocean to expand without a huge risk on the cost of scaling.
That's what Valve has been working on. If they're truly interested in promoting gaming on Linux (as I believe they are), they'll probably work to make that information public, so that all developers can benefit from it.
#3... it is not trivial to get a work permit in Canada these days. Your employer has to involve themselves in an official recruitment process and show that none of the candidates qualified. This requirement is an almost US green card like requirement. By comparison the H-1B (us work permit) is much easier to get. Getting a work permit is relatively easy if you are in oil related (non office) work, but not if in technology.

Perhaps there may be some loopholes for new companies (aka startups), but I am not sure.
We are working on it. We have disabled it temp for now until we can get a very good output. We are improving out engine at the moment. Let me know what else you would like to see.
The last study on this I read said that only 20% of scientists believe that science and religion are in constant conflict with each other. So the pool is not as small as you might think, if that is your requirement.
as long as I can still use something@mailinator.com, I am happy.
Nonsensical formulation. Tell me again how chemistry and biology are non-intersecting? DNA? Wait, what? You need to drop [bracket] sub-segments of science, they are boring and arbitrarty. Just use [science]. You'd tell the interviewee he not a [scientist]? Are you arguing he needs to go outside of scinence to answer his question? That would be a pretty anti-science perspective.
Right. No point of conflict there. All I'm saying is that many technically trained and minded people, in the arena of dealing with human/political issues, seem to rely on idealizations, not unlike mathematical models, when in truth they are too complicated to be represented as such. Maybe the prediliction for mathematics and science betrays a deeper desire for a clean, concise, comprehensible truth, which rarely exists in the social/political realm.
PagerDuty: You Have The Power
Article is spot on for all sorts of reasons. Never mind people typing in domain literals like me@[1.2.3.4].

Internationalised Domain Names are going to REALLY screw over some regexes, given how poorly understood Unicode is. Does Ruby even have Unicode regex support yet? I don't program in it so I'm unfamiliar with the state of the art.

On my pet topic of Unicode, I especially enjoy the use of hidden form fields to reverse-engineer the character encoding certain browsers ACTUALLY send on submission rather that what your code hoped for...

Good luck convincing management to Do The Right Thing here.
The RSS feeds are an awesome feature if you want to follow high-volume, public feeds without cluttering up your twitter feed itself.

I follow several dozen close friends, and like to keep my twitter client free of noise from anyone else so I can get real-time info about what my people are up to. Thus, I follow about another 20 celebrities, bloggers, &c. in my RSS reader where time-criticality isn't an issue.

If they remove RSS feeds, there will be a screen-scraper in my futre, I fear. :(
So to follow your argument, being a lawyer does not make one "law". Shouldn't people other than lawyers have input on laws? :) Also: Godwin's law.
Due to a huge failure on my part, I edited the title to more accurately reflect my opinion on this. I did not mean to say that the regex validations themselves are a waste; my point was that the complex regular expressions are often too strict and almost always overkill.
I think they are less concerned about making people buy another kindle than getting a kindle into the hands of everybody. They make money with selling ebooks.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked this very same question and he basically said: scientists are not interested in politics. They are interested in their field because they spend years going to school to learn and want to do research.

Politics is about laws, not science.
Zend Framework 2.0 and Symfony 2.1 the same day, let the war begin ! :)
New Go Library: XDR + Go = Go-Xdr
>If I enter a valid email address that's just typo'd, the result is the same: the activation email bounces. //

No, you're excluding the set of emails that are entered incorrectly and thus are not valid. The result for those is not the same as if the UI included a simple test (such as your "ambitious" example).

1) Without UI validation:

- 1.1) Email address entered correctly -> activation email sent

- 1.2) Email address entered incorrectly but forms a valid address -> activation email sent to wrong address

- 1.3) Email address entered incorrectly but doesn't form a valid address -> activation email not sent

2) With UI validation:

- 2.1) Email address entered correctly -> activation email sent

- 2.2) Email address entered incorrectly but forms a valid address -> activation email sent to wrong address

- 2.3) Email address entered incorrectly but doesn't form a valid address -> user warned

-- 2.3.1) Email address re-entered correctly -> activation email sent

-- 2.3.2) other states

In the 1.3 case all of the activation emails fail to be sent. In the 2.3.1 case activation emails are sent that otherwise wouldn't be.
This technique is hinted about, and I don't claim it as my own creation. I think the easiest (maybe not the best) route for both devs and users is:

[submit]

does email address have a '@' and a '.' after that?

yes -> send a validation email.

no -> Hey there, [email] seems like an odd address, are you sure?

yes -> send a validation email.

no -> restart

I think this does a reasonable job of staying out of everyone's way, and it catches a large percentage of the actual typographical/user error email entries.

[formatting edit]
I must be pretty strange . . . along with half the people I know.

We follow a lot of twitter accounts (celebs, bloggers) in GReader or NewsBlur to keep our twitter feeds focused on real-life friends.
"Bing won 1 rounds"

What bothers me most about this is that the programmers didn't bother to remove the S from "rounds" when the result was singular... sloppy.
Do you really jump to do a multi-hundred dollar purchase on impulse and then cancel when you have to wait an hour?
Can you turn off justification on the Kindles?
It's this kind of attitude that makes geeks / scientists generally disliked by the 'celebrity-idolizing' masses. My guess is the average person who would meet the qualifications to represent in the house (i.e., read, write, good standing with the law, etc) is probably more intelligent than you think, and a basic competency test could weed out those who aren't.
Most Americans do not own Apple TV. I personally never will. That being said, in a few years WiDi or something else will allow this to happen in other devices.
Why would you assume that? They're two different countries, with different histories, mentioned together because both have excellent education in mathematics and scientifically competent leaders (relevant to the OP).
I wonder if this actually makes it less easy on the eyes than regular e-ink.

I really like e-ink technology but the Kindle approach scares me a bit with it's reluctance to give me proper ownership over the device and content I buy.
Thanks.

After some Google-Fu I found the "proposed changes" you were talking about

http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/releases/2012/...

and yes, software engineering is not on the list

http://www.canadavisa.com/new-instructions-federal-skilled-w...

The best option seems to be PhD! One can apply for permanent residency two years into their PhD programs.
Does every product launch have to be about replacing existing gear? Our expectation that good products need to replace what we have seems pathological. I have friends with first gen iPhones that they love. I've subsisted on a ten year old Nokia before...
Even worse is the non optional ads "Special Offers"... WTF?
What's the problem with datasheets on the old style Kindles?
That is beautiful. And grandparent does indeeed link to the best regex ever, http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html
Ask HN: organising historical personal data
Any experience organising personal files dating from decades back, much of it useless but not irrelevant? Entire filesystems, backups, backups of backups, stored in CDs, hard disks, as zip files, email, etc?

The purpose is to be able to answer questions such as: where's that picture? Is this the last revision? Are there any backups of those files? And to essentially keep a canonical copy of each item (for some useful definition of item).

Simple search won't solve it because data will be repeated several times. A file duplicate finder would need some additional information about how things are going to be organized.
I've always thought that the real money in mobile comes from very accurate map data, and very accurate personal position data. that way when you're walking around town, you can 'ask' your phone for directions to eat/shop/whatever, and it can give you a great recommendation ( for a price to local restaurants ). I asked Eric Schmidt if this was a powerful motivator behind the android acquisition, as at the time it seemed like a natural fit, and surprisingly he did not say no. And yes I know that Android was bought 'on a whim, gut instinct' but this is the perfect use case for it.
We should really stop using Compete as evidence for anything. Not only are they frequently an order of magnitude off, they're oftentimes not even directionally correct in their movements.

Other than that, your points are valid, especially wrt affiliate based companies.
> The Amazon software is a big value-subtraction to me.

Yep. My Nexus 7 is far more useful than the Kindle Fire. I actually like the Fire, but it's very much based on consuming stuff from Amazon. No Google apps is kind of painful - no Gmail, no Reader, no Maps... Also, the Nexus 7 handles switching back and forth between English and Italian with aplomb. The Fire doesn't seem to at all, and I don't know if they are changing that with this latest update - Amazon is a fairly US-centric company, whereas Google got exposed to the world a lot more via Android.

I wish Amazon would stick to content. I think they're better at it than Google in terms of a selection of music, video and of course books. But I don't think they're as good at producing a device that is designed to be flexible and used in ways that aren't 'consuming Amazon content'.
What you have described is an EPR experiment, not a quantum teleportation experiment. Also, we don't have any way of persisting a quantum state for 6 months. And, the above discussion is a little misleading because there exists a set of experiments which show "coherence effects" -- basically, that the universe is not obeying the classical probabilities. In this case neither Bob nor Carol see coherence effects on their own qubits (the blue/red state is really a 0-vs-1 distinction, hence quantum bits), but there are coherence effects to be seen in correlations between their measurements -- so if they ever communicate about some experiments they ran, they can do experiments which are inconsistent with the idea that Nature has "made up its mind" whether the ball is red or blue, the same as in double-slit diffraction where Nature has not "made up its mind" whether a photon has gone through the one slit or the other. That's the gist of the EPR experiment.

Let's get into what makes this a teleportation experiment though. Bob and Carol, we assume, still share these EPR pairs of well-entangled objects. What can you do with them? Let me just use "normal" to describe a channel which communicates normal 0's and 1's -- like the Internet does, or radio communications to Mars or what have you.

It turns out, you can communicate one of these clearly-abnormal states from Bob to Carol, using only normal bits. Bob wants to send another quantum state S to Carol but can only send normal bits. He entangles S with his side of the entangled pair, measures the two to get some normal bits, then sends these to Carol. Carol can use the normal bits to modify her own side of the EPR pair into the state S. All of the weird quantum nature of S seems to have "hopped over" sometime between the entanglement and the measurement: the classical information sent just seems too puny, in the sense that we know you can't use a normal channel to communicate a quantum state without such an entangled pair.[1]

Still, the two normal bits that Bob sends seem to be important, in the sense that they tell Carol the right way to "look" at the teleported quantum system, which is not trivial. In that sense there is a much firmer speed-of-light barrier established: the information about the "right way to look at the teleported qubit" is classical, and cannot go faster than light, even though the weird quantum nature of the qubit seemingly did.

[1] That's not entirely true. If Bob makes the state himself then he can tell Carol how to make a copy. Instead you have to imagine that Alice gives quantum states to Bob which Bob doesn't know: Bob can still send these to Carol.
I have a Kindle Keyboard and a Nexus 7 with the Kindle app. Lately I've been reading more on the Nexus 7, but when I use the touchscreen to turn pages it has a very high error rate. I usually turn the page by tapping the screen on one side or the other, but as often as not, my tap has a bit of a slide to it, and if that slide goes the wrong way I get the wrong page. It's really very annoying.

(I don't know if the touchscreen Kindles have the same tap/slide interaction; I'm just reporting my experience with the Kindle hardware and software I have.)

It would be much less annoying if I had the option to disable sliding entirely and just respond to taps without regard to any sliding motion. Then I could tap one side of the screen or the other reliably.

But seriously, one side of the screen or the other? Haven't they heard that people hold the Nexus 7 with one hand while reading - and not always the same hand? If I'm holding it with my left hand, it's not easy to get my thumb all the way to the right side to do a tap page flip.

If this worked like the late great FictionWise eReader software, I'd have the option of ignoring all sliding motion and tapping the bottom of the screen for the next page or the top of the screen for the previous page. Then it would work identically with whichever hand I'm holding the device.

Now consider the Kindle Keyboard: Each side has a big next-page and a smaller previous-page button. It's trivial to hold the device with either hand and rest my thumb on the next-page button. I can click that button when I want, without moving my hand at all! No worries about tapping the wrong side of the screen, accidentally sliding the wrong way, or anything. It just works.
It's not hard, though. Anybody can go online and search for an email validating regex, but as some have pointed out, many are too strict and don't allow for, say, tagged email addresses (email+tag@example.com). There's email validation, and there's overkill. That's what I was trying to get at.
>I found the syntax baffling, the documentation copious, but written for mathematicians instead of hackers

I'm always surprised how much people hate the syntax of R. I primarily work in Python, but I use R once or twice a week... and the syntax seems very clean to me. Can someone give mee an example of what you dislike with R's syntax?

I'm even more surprised to hear complaints about the documentation in R. The help files in R are much more complete and well organized than docstrings in the python libraries we use. Even the web usually lacks anything as useful as what I get from the vignettes function in my R interpreter.
Related article and discussion (Eight Out Of China’s Top Nine Government Officials Are Scientists): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556590

A scientist's/engineer's life is one of constant learning. They simply cannot take time off to run a campaign/take office for a few years.
Thanks, but I think you might be underestimating exactly how "tech un-savvy" my mother is :)
If people were not vacuous vacum heads then comments like 'shut your pie hole' would not be needed.
The only current candidate is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons but I don't think it has enough plutonium to last as long as Voyager, plus it's not as fast as Voyager and will never pass it.

Voyager is so fast because it took advantage of an unusual planetary alignment.
Nice way for small and large venues to estimate their cost! Free for promoters, nice!
Not a bad idea since it would make easier to pull changes outside of the automation without needing to specify the GIT_SSH variable.
Atomic Theory Of 400 BC
Google are only a small part of the spatial data capture world. They provide amazing access to a few datasets and completely ignore others. Location searches are laughably bad unless you are looking for a hotel. They do not even come close to providing comprehensive topographic mapping.
By golly actual data.

Are you sure you're on the right web site?
This subject has always caused me a great deal of headaches while trying to wrap my mind around it.

If I understand you correctly then, the term 'teleportation' is entirely misleading in this context.

I am also wondering about another issue: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
How can you accurately gauge the state of a particle, in order to 'transport' it elsewhere, when Heisenberg seems to be convinced this is impossible to do?

Thirdly: 'teleportation' as you explained it, seems to me to be more of a game of "Let's see what's over there, then observe this spot here and wait until some particle randomly displays characteristics similar enough to consider it equal. We can then pretend we did it with science!". Is this the case, or do they actually 'do' something on the other end to create a new particle with a specific state?

Disclaimer: I am very much an arm-chair physicist with as much understanding of this subject matter as the average doormat.