skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is generally speaking an excellent comment about which I agree more or less completely, but your final statement doesn't really tie it all together and instead is itself an example of a fallacious statement. Even if it is true that there is a lot of diversity between nations with a majority Muslim population, it does not necessarily follow that there are not certain opinions and responses to stimuli that we might expect within populations which ostensibly adhere to the same religion. Indeed, much of modern social science (Weber, Durkheim) was founded on articulating the differences between predominately Catholic and Protestant countries, including the now famous "Protestant work ethic."

Of course, at the time I'm sure it was politically incorrect to say that "Catholics are lazy," and even now that would be an astonishingly rude over-simplification -- nonetheless it is possible to make generalizations on the basis of aggregated data that are generally correct.

To chose a somewhat less politically sensitive example, if one were to look cross culturally at fundamentalists within monotheistic traditions, I suspect you would find that they support wife-beating at a much higher average than the general population -- of course, this is a much more politically correct way of going about things, insofar as you don't disturb things too much by pointing out the problems in people who are, generally speaking, quite far away from you -- nonetheless, we are able to make these sorts of generalizations accurately and there is no reason why we can not also do so for the Muslim world.
Apps like these usually end up being a nuisance to those that use it and then they quit using it.

IMO the best option is to use a backless exercise ball chair. When it's backless you'll want to stand up once in a while to give your back muscles a little break. Also, standing up in a backless chair is just one movement(just stand up) while a backed chair requires two or three(stop resting on back, move forward, then stand up).
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History of Computing in Ukraine
Without making any statement about the climate change debate itself...

It bothers me more than a little when research is funded by taxpayers, yet we taxpayers are forbidden from seeing what was happening with our money.

Even absent public funding, the nature of science is that, at the very least, all results, data, and methodological information should be wide open. When you add in that we're paying for it, I can't see where they get the right to conceal part of their work. If you don't want open books, then don't look for open funding; the private sector would be happy to keep your communications secret, if it's on their dime.
I like the position of this C2 article on goto: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GotoConsideredHarmful

It argues that forward gotos (that work like continue, break, returns mid-function) don't contribute to spaghetti code, while backward gotos are more problematic.
I use Virgin Media, but I'm not sure what you mean by 'password for the service'.

AFAIK you don't need a password to access the internet , just plug the cable modem in.

There is a password that you create which is used to call customer support, but AFAIK it's only used by the callcenter.

It's also worth noting that Virgin Media is nothing to do with virgin mobile, Virgin Media is still operated by the old telewest/NTL but they bought the Virgin branding.
The discovery of the South African diamond mines in 1870 and its impact on the diamond industry seems to be a good analogy for what the music industry is going through today. In both cases there is rapid shift from scarcity to abundance, and in both cases, the supply side of the market try to save their businesses by engineering artificial scarcity. Somehow I doubt the record industry in its present form will fare quite as well though.
Kickstarter is not in some bizzarro pocket universe where the normal protections against fraud don't apply.

If someone truly takes the money and runs, that's a criminal offense. Kickstarter doesn't need special policies to make it so, and I'm sure they'd cooperate with a criminal investigation. I think they've even said as much!
Teaching IT professionals, refreshing Design patterns and antipatterns
Startup wants to spark a factory revolution with a low-cost, user-friendly robot
That's right.

I think the phrase is correct changing the word programs for languages.
I've been programming for around 20 years now, and I've very, very rarely seen goto statements used, except in the case of error handling (which, in my opinion, was a great use of goto). So, I think as an industry, we've done a good job in curtailing the use of goto, so the article really shouldn't have bothered mentioning it, because it's more like a red herring than anything else.

However, I've seen a whole crapload of terrible code. You don't need goto to create code that jumps around, and where the state is very hard to determine. That can easily be caused by things like global variables, badly designed code, etc.
Not sure how George Grellas hasn't been mentioned yet (HN's "grellas"), but if you're a US startup, I recommend his firm.
It still has a rear differential, stock ratio is 4.10.
On the other hand, my bank only allows 4, and when I go overseas, I sometimes can't use my card at all because they require at least 5/6/8.
Another pasta-flavored programming problem is "ravioli code". That kind of code has abstraction layers for everything and stuff is forced into objects and classes when all that's needed is a simple function or heck, even a goto statement. Code like this may seem elegant to the author but trying to read it is as futile an exercise as going through a pile of spaghetti code.

Given the popularity of OOP during the past few decades, ravioli may be a bigger problem than spaghetti these days.
Spaghetti code is in many respects the byproduct of poor design and lack of planning at all levels.

For some though it is a job security abstraction layer.
I generally agree with everything in the article, but there was a statement that caught me up, "I can’t believe that Lifx has managed to solve the enormous problems that many huge companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying — and generally failing — to fix."

I don't believe that large companies with hundreds of millions of dollars are always the right people to find the solution. Isn't this something we tackle a lot of the time? Being the small fish in the big pond? I do think that we should be wary of the snakewater salesmen of the world, but don't discount someone just because they don't have a large, bureaucratic organization backing them.

That being said, it would be really nice for some sort of rating system to be put into place. Force these inventors to generate brand loyalty even if it is to them as a person.
I can well believe that the scanbox is at a stage where there's simply not that much left for the guys to do except wait for the manufacturing to turn around. Why not start another project if they've got the time for it?
They're after the scientists' personal emails, that's a bit much and obviously just a fishing expedition for the next ginned up scandal.
Pitch Club
As supporting evidence, the author points to the high frequency of "2580", which is vertically down on a numeric keypad but not on a computer keyboard. That dissuades me from accepting your high level of disagreement.
Very nicely done, but personal home pages flopped 5 years ago, why will this work now?
Rethink Robotics Announces Baxter Robot Helper, We Go Hands-On in Boston
One interesting twist to this...

If you were going to make a movie, with professional actors playing the roles, and your final goal was to create something that would be considered slanderous of Islam, there's are arguments in favor of keeping the actors in the dark about your actual intent.

Assuming that this fact would be easily discovered (and the actors could plausibly deny all accountability publicly), that does protect them quite a bit from most backlash; so you'd mostly be risking your own neck, not theirs.

In theory, anyway... in reality, the people who suffer the backlash will be, for example, IT workers at a US embassy with no connection to the film whatsoever.

And the actors, yes, will be protected somewhat, but not completely; and they'd probably prefer to be able to make the decision on whether they'd like that (reduced) backlash or not.

I suspect the theoretical protection is what the film creator had in mind, though.
You would only be able to DOS a individual accounts, rather than the whole website. Do it by IP address, sure at some point someone with a huge enough botnet will be able to crack an account. But is it likely that someone will use their entire botnet to crack a single user's password on some consumer service?
No, in this case it's actually the tech news journalists' fault for believing pretty much anything that can be said in a video. I didn't see anything asking Kickstarter to shape up; the call to action was for the reporters.

And he's right. This article should have been written by, say, GigaOm. I'd want a Wired article to go into more technical depth than this one does. I'd guess that, if I found the articles that pointed to the Kickstarter, they don't.
Where do any of these top minds of physics say that this drive does not violate causality??? They DON'T! If they asserted such a nonsensical thing, they would be the laughing stock of the scientific world and would no longer be considered any kind of mind, other than a quack. The only reason that you don't see much talk about this violation of causality is that it's just a fact that all physicists know. One physicist doesn't have to tell another physicist that an FTL drive violates causality; it just goes without saying. It would be like one physicist telling another physicist that 1 + 1 = 2. It doesn't need to be said!

It doesn't matter ONE TINY BIT to Special Relativity how it appears to YOU that you got information from point A to point B. What matters is how it appears to an OUTSIDE OBSERVER. If Earth and Mars are still 8 light minutes apart from some point of view, and you managed to transmit information from Earth to Mars in only 4 minutes, then there are frames of reference in which your message arrived at Mars BEFORE it left Earth.

This is just freshman-level Special Relativity. I guarantee you, that no one has found a work-around for that, especially since it is a matter of LOGIC. It follows LOGICALLY from the assertions of Special Relativity. If you wish to deny this conclusion, then you would have to deny Special Relativity.

If on the other hand, you have used your drive to permanently shred up space and time, rapidly crashing Mars into Earth and destroying all life on both planets, leaving the mess like that, and then stating you have successfully transmitted a message at FTL speeds, then more power to ya!
It's not even an investment. It's patronage, pure and simple.
Or refers to Richard Branson's Book "Losing my virginity": http://www.amazon.com/Losing-My-Virginity-Survived-Business/...
This goes nicely with Rich Hickey's hammock-driven development talk.

http://blip.tv/clojure/hammock-driven-development-4475586
They could offer content directly to users in other countries for a nominal fee or per access fee and make more returns than they do offering up content to one provider or another for a lesser overall fee. Would be interesting and if done right would make piracy redundant. Could even add in the aspect of gaining viewing credits by filling in marketing information. ANything that makes the TV fee in the UK more palatable.
Or just outsource it to the lowest bidder, or better yet an automated system.
US Libya relations will be mired for years because of the murders of US citizens.
What happened to "web surfing"?
Relevant here is that Virgin Mobile USA is a completely different business to Virgin UK. Virgin USA is an MVNO on the Sprint network. As a joint venture between Virgin and Sprint, I wonder what actual involvement Virgin has in this area. Ensuring standards and oversight certainly isn't part if that involvement.
How can you seriously say this "And we hired a designer on Elance to design an icon. It costs us $50, but absolutely worth the money" and then this:"Icon is super important. Make sure you hired the right talent"?

As a designer I like the design, but 50 bucks? "worth the money"? I have no idea why anyone would want to sell their design for just 50 bucks. Is this designer your friend? One thing I do know for sure: If they ask 50 bucks for an icon they'll be very bussy but out of business within a month.
That's a really good idea.

So I made this: http://jobstxt.org/ and http://jobstxt.org/jobs.txt
Kickstarter could significantly improve things by imposing a cap on the amount of money taken above the original request.

This is similar to what Groupon have had to do, because it was killing their reputation. People are estimating "Well, we could make about 500 of these", then receiving orders (and the money) for 50,000 of them. Suddenly the predicted ship dates go out 2 or 3 times as long, and people get upset.
I'm not sure it's fraud per se. Kickstarter seems like a way of monetizing up-votes. They have various sized up-arrows that are tied to a bucket of electronic chits over a PayPal. I sometimes wonder if people back projects with the same forethought they bring to up voting a good story.
I'm totally on your side. But then, if physical products or other services as reward were forbidden, the big Amanda Palmer campaign would probably not have happened. Most of the rewards were cds, an art book, entrance to more or less private gigs etc. So even though people liked it, all got something in return. And if Amanda Palmer would have flunked and not finished the recording in time or the tour would have fallen through or... they'd all be pissed off. She managed to pull that one off admirably and people are happy with what they got, but that's the same with products. If things go well, everybody is happy. Perhaps the problem is twofold: Artists may be forgiven by their fans for a failure. (Fans are fans in the end) And maybe physical products are much much harder than a T-Shirt.
These findings and proposed hypotheses likely influence policies which financially hit just about everyone. Billions of tax dollars have been diverted on the basis of climate research. Is it really an extravagant demand to know what these scientists' discussions amount to?
The problem with all the stupid "this is not islam" posts is simple :

Did "the prophet" kill people (cruelly) just for disagreeing with him according to muslim scripture ?

And the answer is a blatant and simple yes. Nor did he even look for the facts, he had an entire village executed because some random woman came to him and claimed they laughed at him. Somehow allah failed to inform the prophet of what later turned out to be the case : that she had been passed over for marriage and wanted a mad mob to attack that village. Of course the prophet ordered his followers to do exactly that.

Is this the only case of muslims killing for idiotic reasons "on orders from allah" in muslim scripture ? Not at all.

How exactly can you hope to claim those random mob attacks are not part of your religion, given these simple facts ? The answer is you can't, but you do it anyway, knowing full well that there are about as many muslims who know what their religion is, and have read the core texts as Christians, or even atheists for that matter : barely any at all, and most of those are silent because the institutions their part of have ulterior motives.

The problem is that while I agree with your intent, you are a fraud, and that offends my scientific education. No matter how horrible or disgusting the truth is, it's better than lies.
And yet backward goto is extremely useful. Consider this Java,

redo: while(true) {
for(Item x : xs)
if(f(x))
continue redo;
break;
}

With goto,

redo:
for(Item x : xs)
if(f(x))
goto redo;

Most people seem at first to balk at the goto, even though they're functionally identical, and the goto is much clearer and less error prone...
If they're smart they'll try to create a profit model oriented around online services, and switch their revenue stream to be funded through this.

Currently they're funded through the "TV charge" which is a nasty footnote to life in the UK. Regularly I get hatemail through the letterbox telling me what a bad person I am for not paying the fee (mandatory for all owners of televisions), presuming that I have a TV.

Yes, you can call them up and tell them that you're not a crimial, but that's not how life in a free country is meant to work, and I'm damned if I'm going to play the game. "Return to sender" every time.
Yeah, I thought so, but the play on word was nice, given that they waited for Red Hat to acquire the tech.
I didn't say that the ScanBox wasn't a cool idea ... but it looks more like something you'd find as a DIY article.
Short Spans, Big Solutions: Custom Application ‘Bridges’ Gap For Steel Industry
With Google killing iGoogle late next year ... this looks like a natural replacement!
My point was only there might be some real danger to the actors because of some sentiments in part of the Islamic "community". That doesn't imply that Islam is worse than other religions (personally I have no fondness for any of them, but that is another story).

Although I wonder how it is structured - why can some Imams get by with issuing such statements? I don't think any priests of the "big" christian churches could do such a thing without being expelled. However, there seem to be a lot of crazy private "Christian" churches that are probably capable of anything. I am just not sure if their actions would then be described as "Christians doing stuff"?

One similar thing that comes to mind is "Christians" calling for abortion doctors to be killed (I think there were also some successful killings or at least attempts at it).
It's not donations. Donations are given without return to a cause you consider worthy. An exchange is promised, but the promise is not a sale, it's "We try and make this, and if we pull it of, you get one." It's more of a high-risk investment where you already consider the money lost, the moment you spend it.

And I'm on your side: It's not kickstarters fault, if people think otherwise - still they could make that point a little stronger.
From the look of it I think it's a stock template icon with some tweaking?
Unrelated to the content but if you do insist on chunking your articles up into pages, at least break them at paragraph boundaries! Or even sentence boundaries - breaking them mid-sentence is atrocious.
Hiring and retaining great employees
It would be great for consumers if these came with an app store where you could buy programs to do different tasks around the house (wash dishes, cook a specific meal, etc). If it was useful enough, it's not crazy to think that a family would spend 20k on one (same cost as a car).
Ooh, nice. To the extent that an engagement ring says "I'm willing to make a sacrifice to prove that I'm serious about you" a tattoo totally works.
here is the one I consider dead and the backer is just hoping everyone will forget. I posted it last week on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4523753

The 2nd one I'm still hoping the backers will come through or at least refund the backers. So I'll hold that one for now.

I have backed 16 projects and the first was TikTok Nano watch band which funded Dec 2010. Out of the 16 only 2 have me very concerned.

I just backed two more projects one for $1,299 which is a 3D Printer and the other $99 for 3D printer software. I will continue to back things but I look carefully at their estimated ship date. It must be within 60 days, and I will dispute any charge from a project that doesn't deliver within that window.
The article mentions that as well: "Backward gotos could be ok when it makes sense that your error case would repeat the last iteration"

Btw, in Ruby there are two keywords that are basically backward gotos: redo and retry.
that's an interesting article that shows the difference between markov and monte-carlo approaches, but it seems to be incomplete. in particular, although it claims it will calculate an exact solution (just after the "Markov Chains" subtitle) it never does; the example uses repeated calculations and stops at some point to give an approximate answer. am i misunderstanding something?
Dark energy camera snaps first images
Where does pitch club happen? Online? Coming soon to a city near me?
Operation: Make Stuff
What I Learned From Launching
I think the disclaimer about Exceptions being a suitable form of GOTO is a big mistake.

When I started using Erlang I was amazed at how error handling and all that 'necessary' gumph just disappeared. In the Erlang world exceptions aren't handled up the call stack - when an Erlang process hits an error it just exits.

The Erlang control approach is that for each (restartable) worker process that does something there is a supervisor process whose only job is to catch 'I have died because...' messages from its children and restart sub-systems as appropriate.

It is just amazing what this approach does. There is no longer a 'fog of exception handling' necessary to keep the system running in the prescence of errors, there are clear and consistent reports of ALL errors - which means you can start squashing the bugs that cause them and iterate towards error-free programming.
If the director wanted to protect actors, they'd have used machinima (rendering via computer games). No, what they wanted was easy-to-hate American faces to dub over, who were kept in the dark so they wouldn't protest or decline.
That's a misunderstanding it seems. The real meaning is that "under the hood, it's javascript", and not "it's like javascript".
People read "It's just Javascript", and jump to the second meaning, without thinking of the first, but the rest of the text is pretty explicit.
This is a great point! We even had to do some research about this right now. Apparently our customers refer to this simply as "cookies", but when we checked our competitors' websites, they seem to avoid the mention of cookies completely.
Which presents a problem in itself, because if you're operating in Europe, the customers have to be aware of the cookie collection to put a notification about this on their website.
But this is absolutely something that we need to consider. Thanks!
After writing a bit of Javascript recently I get the feeling that callbacks are the new goto.
your original comment says one thing (prioritization of Android) then another (how a lot of Android apps repurpose iOS designs).

Are you saying there's a general appreciation for Android, so it's higher priority nowadays?... or are you saying Android is actually being prioritized over iOS? The latter would be surprising imo.
Technically speaking, it's mandatory if you're receiving live broadcasts. You can have a television with no tuner without a license, and if you're watching live TV on your computer you're meant to have one.
I understood mail fraud did NOT cover electronic sales...
I know posters below are ripping your 'in Europe' phrasing, because truly, there's no 'Europe' when it comes to legal systems and judgements.

But after stints in Malaga, Amsterdam, London, and Marseilles, I believe you. The legal systems there in Europe, in aggregate, do seem fairer and more logical than what the USA has. Especially with respect to small business.

Maybe "Ever." was overstating the case. But I do think that in most of Europe you need to worry about litigation so much less that it makes the US system seem bizarre.

(This is also true in Tokyo, where I live. This makes me suspect that some kind of weird outlier thing is going on in the USA with regard to litigation, as it is with infant mortality, literacy, etc.)