skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "[]+[]" throws a TypeError

Couldn't agree more. But that's the standard. At some point I hoped that the ES5 'use strict' would fix all of this SNAFU, but it didn't.

However, not even once I tried to sum [] + [] or {} + {} till that "wat" video. Funny, but unrealistic, therefore: close, but no cigar. One could operate the "World's safest table saw", but the common sense tells us that usually finger vs. saw => saw wins. Safer tools are desirable, but it's up to the craftsman to use them properly.

> the lowest common denominator changes to V8

V8 is pretty much on par with its competition with the ES5 adoption, therefore we can hardly talk about a lowest common denominator that's actually low. The only thing that I actually missed in V8 vs. the Mozilla engines is the support for E4X (which most runtimes don't support anyway).

http://kangax.github.com/es5-compat-table/ - even if IE6 and IE7 are gone from the traffic stats, IE8 is there to stay with the XP users. Some of us still don't have the possibility to just drop those users as long as the analytic data shows a fair share of legacy users.

Ruby isn't part of the "similar syntax" family. The '==' operator isn't recommended in JS (and PHP). In fact, jslint yells at you if you use it. That's why '===' exists. The semi-colon insertion is one of the big failures on the "allowed" part. Wish that never happened. But any developer that doesn't try to adhere to some hipster JavaScript coding style uses the semi-colon at the end of the statement.
Latest AlphaDog Robot Prototypes Get Less Noisy, More Brainy
It may have something to do with the fact that ranking organization is in the UK. The same thing happens with a few other 'academic' rankings I have seen.
I cannot offer any kind of sponsorship. But my wife and I are looking at settling in Germany in the future. This makes Berlin a lot more attractive to me.
>Well, how do you tell they exist at all?

The videos of their figurehead? The word of various countries involved? The guys which have been caught red handed trying to pull off something? (Hardly "entrapment".. need I mention the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber? Both were AQ operatives)

Also, please learn what "entrapment" means. It doesn't mean what you think it means.. for absolute starters, entrapment is when you convince someone to commit a crime they otherwise would not have.
It is too bad that Democrats and Republicans rule the political sphere. It would make the political environment much more interesting if the Libertarian and Green Party played a bigger role.
Google Wins Major Antitrust Victory In Brazil
This gives an idea of the frustration of watching the w3 in the 1990s and the way they behaved at the time.

Microsoft: Here's a working, fully implemented and debugged, format for doing vector graphics in a browser. How about we standardize on that?

W3C: Cool, we'll take a look at it... [overthink overthink overthink] ... OK, here's our brand new, "Standardized" way of doing vector graphics in a browser, which nobody has tried to implement and only somewhat overlaps with IE's working reference implementation.

Microsoft-hating-developers (which was understandably most of them back then): Grr!!! Microsoft, you've broken the STANDARDS again!!! M$ Sucks!

I remember this exact cycle repeating itself a half dozen times in the 90s, and it took a lot of the fun out of trying to build web apps that worked cross browser.
I find the rankings from ARWU (a Shanghai-based institute) makes more sense.

http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2012.html

The Top ten universities listed there are

1	Harvard University
2	Stanford University
3	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
4	University of California, Berkeley
5	University of Cambridge
6	California Institute of Technology
7	Princeton University
8	Columbia University
9	University of Chicago
10	University of Oxford
ClojureScript: 4 Things That Might Worry You, but Shouldn't
Pictures of faces and buildings with which we aren't acquainted likely remain abstract to most people; however, a remote system that was directly related to a person's daily work is something concrete. It doesn't take much of an imagination to go from that server disappearing to realizing that the people who maintain it's various elements are gone as well.
Terrible marketing strategy to emphasize product size. Normally any device smaller than regular keyboard is an achievement. They suppose to emphasize accuracy and usability.
I think the problem is that you are aware of this profiling in the first place. Many are not. At least if they are informed, they can make a decision as to whether or not they care about it.

I don't know where I lie on the divide between those who value the input that targeted advertising can bring and those who are vehemently against any form of tracking. The problem I think is the uneducated majority in the middle. They may browse one site and then wonder why ads from that site or for a similar product are suddenly appearing. They have no awareness whatsoever that information about their browsing habits is being collected.

I personally think it is a more preferable situation to have an educated populace opting in to that form of collection of information than to have an uneducated one who has no comprehension that companies are engaging in this sort of behaviour.

I accept it is likely to be relatively harmless in many cases, but as I saw, I would rather than an informed opt-in or at least knowledge that this was taking place.
Are you required to give the cookie notice if people log in to your site (and you only use cookie's after that point)?
Design of Effective A/B Tests
"Did USSR attack US on a massive scale, and on US soil?"

No, they did not. But is that because the USSR was never a threat? Or, was it because the US correctly assessed the USSR's threat and planned accordingly? I won't say that the M.A.D. deterrence strategy was the correct strategy, but I think it would be silly to say that there never was a threat of global war. There certainly were moments where that almost happened. It's worth noting that while both the US and USSR drew up battle plans for potential war, only the USSR had a preemptive strike as a key part of its primary plan.
I would definitely sign up for a mailing list, +1
Fast, Fair, and Frictionless Content Licensing On The Internet (continued)
Honestly, these rankings are [always] ridiculous.

Clearly there is a need to capture certain metrics and display that as quantitative information, and the difference between, say, the top 10 and the 90-100 is probably relevant, but the difference within the top ~20 is so minimal its largely irrelevant.

It really galls me when people make decisions about undergraduate or graduate schools (or, probably employees, although this is a position I'm yet to be in) based on these kinds of rankings. Clearly it should factor to some extent (i.e. Harvard vs. Jeremey's University of Rubishville[1]) but there are MANY much more important factors to consider.

The irony is that the rankings are 50% opinion based, which basically amounts to identifying where people think are prestigious. I wonder what people use to identify which the prestigious universities are - they can't possible go and visit them all, but if only there were some kind of online ranking they could use to get an idea...

[1] When I went to undergraduate, this was the fictional university my younger brother suggested he might end up going to.
EHealth: Document management in healthcare
Why does that make more sense? It's just different and equally as arbitrary a set of ranking criteria as the original article.
And bash.org is websense'd as tasteless.

I thought I got away from this filter fucktardery when I left high school years ago.
Welcome to the world of $LARGE_ORGANIZATION bashing. People usually never read anything that comes from $LARGE_ORGANIZATION, but love to complain about it. Unfortunately, that is especially true for $EVERYONE.

(Sorry. Excessively-specific adjectives are a bit of a pet peeve of mine.)
Have all the specs been left out or am I missing something? .. Anyway - ignoring that!

Interestingly the Perks/Rewards for this are a departure from what other KickStarter and Indiegogo campaigns have offered... Even the highest level ($10,000) doesn't seem to "buy" you a phone..
Alcatel-Lucent Open Sources its API Management Engine
Pre-emptive commit comments
If the ranking is by perceived quality, then I guess this makes sense: it's much harder for an institution to be best in the world at many diverse subjects.
Taking pictures of military bases sounds fishy, but not if you've ever played Armed Assault. Reality is their biggest selling point.
YouTube releases iPhone app as Apple prepares to drop video service
I will be happy if there's a way to sync podcasts across devices.
That case goes back decades. They settled long ago. ITunes caused trouble when Apple Computer got into the music business.
According to http://www.cookie-checker.com, the top 3 uses 65 to 85 cookies(!) Law or no law, I still think this is quite heavy in the light of privacy.
Its probably using APIs that aren't in 4.2.1.
Defamation Case Highlights Google's Double Standard
Number of people who died due to military attacks in Afghanistan : nobody knows.

At least 40 000, officially, but "we don't count".

Seems legit.
Good point! I would think that a search tool in the new guide would provide the kind of experience you are describing.
The concept is very cool, but I find the UI lacking. I'd expect to see a cumulative expansion from patient zero, with a more continuous timeline. This appears to show the current visitors at that moment in time, which could allow for the viewer to see how visits fluctuate with time of day and surges grow larger over time, but it fails to even show this very well.

Of course it's easy to criticize, so props for the neat idea and decent execution.
Encrypted Sessions with PHP
Cookie-checker.com - check safely which cookies are set by a site
Survey reveals the worldwide migration patterns of researchers
I wonder if the idea is worth more than the act.

By actively talking about how, if 1 fan can make something viral you have created an external something that can catalyze the spread. The idea of 1 person trying to make something viral is interesting in itself and will help generate the impetus that just might carry it through to 'viral', independent of the music and the action itself.

It matters if that 1 fan is a highly connected node or only 1 or even 2 from a highly connected node with each having a high reshare probability.

Good idea. Used up now I think.
There is a case for doing both, pre-rendering on the server, and rendering updates on the client. This approach is used by Google plus for example.

I wrote a simple implementation that uses google closure templates to pre-render the page with dynamic content on the server, and to me the app felt more stable. This feeling may be entirely subjective, as I didn't make any actualy measurements.

A counterargument may be that this approach does not scale and would overload a server resulting in worse stabilit/render-time in the end.
Even works on FF 13.0.1 (Fedora)...
Some things one agrees with and some that sound like typical non-programmer (and sadly, some-programmer) lists.

E.g "Return Apple to its roots with minimalism - does a photo manager have to be 707 MB?"

Yes it has. People think the binary is "bloated", while in actuality it's mostly templates for photo books and such, that doesn't get loaded or impact performance at all if you don't use them.

>Unix package manager - basically an official version of Homebrew/Macports/Fink.

And what good would that do? Do you really want to wait for Apple to release new versions of third party programs?

>Replace AppKit with UIKit.

Does not even make sense.

>[re: iTunes] Apple, this needs to stop. Even if the segregation of all of these components into separate, modern apps was the only new feature in 10.9, I would gladly pay my money and walk away a satisfied customer.

Really? People keep saying that, to sound smart (in how they condemn "bloat"), but I think it's wrong. You know what is worse than using one app to handle 15 tasks related to your media/app collection? Using 15 apps to do the same. How would that work? At best they can break it down to 2-3 apps --which you would still have to use every time you want to sync your phone.

>We all know the Mac needs a new, modern file system to ditch the ancient HFS/HFS+.

I for one do not know that. What's the problem with HFS+ again? I mean the actual problem that matters for the common user and that ZFS is supposed to solve in a desktop/laptop machine.

Does this guy even know how ZFS works? In a space constrained SSD disk it would be a disaster. And managing logical volumes and consistency with 1-2 drives is not exactly it's core strength. It's design is all about the enterprise and the server space.
Whatsapp iOS password generation
They usually understand when I tell them that "Equity isn't tasty".

Some of them then offer money, which can be traded for things that are tasty. They are the ones I usually end up working with.
Nobody has tried to implement, only somewhat overlaps existing implementations, and probably contains some nontrivial set of computationally expensive or infeasible standards. (See quincunx's comment elsewhere in this discussion, for example.) Then people online complain how long it takes the browser makers to implement full compliance to, say, the latest CSS spec.

In general, the W3C has worked better than just letting random groups run rampant, but I am coming around to preferring the style where we don't call it a standard until there are at least two implementations already.
Why Arguing With A Customer Is Obviously Ridiculous
Ask HN: How much would you pay for a NOC?
I've been a sysadmin for about 10 years and I'm thinking about going out on my own. How much would you pay to have someone on retainer to respond to oncall pages? I'm not talking about instant escalation to other engineers but actual troubleshooting and investigation when there is an issue.
I have two degrees from the UK, and am currently doing a PhD in the US. During the application process I visited 8-10 different graduate schools in the states, and honestly, I felt like any one of them would be comfortably in the top 5 in the UK.

Maybe that's a totally superficial assessment, but in terms of the quality of facilities, research going on and the interaction I had with professors they were awesome. I don't think this is surprising though - the US is a lot bigger (and I visited a lot of the top universities) so you'd expect there to be more high quality institutions, because there are simply a lot more students/faculty.

This is why I find the UK occupying a lot of the top ten to be someone dubious. No slight against the British academic world, but four out of the top six when adjusted for funds and population just seems ridiculous.
I hate that font, unreadable.
As far as I understand, the versioning implementation in OS X is built on top of SQLite, which has one-reader/writer-at-a-time-only transaction semantics. I wonder how much this contributes to the beach balls.

Save As must come back.

iCloud syncing of Notes is broken. Notes which are supposed to be in iCloud often get branched to On My Mac without me noticing, where I continue editing them, only to create conflicts.

TextEdit list view should stay open if you want it.

Notes and TextEdit need to be merged. I like the note browser view, but prefer TextEdit's white background.

A package manager as good as apt-get would be great.
Intelligence (at least IQ-measured intelligence) is normally distributed with 100 at the median. Some people equate "dumb" with "dumber than them". If such a person is 1 or 2 standard deviations above the median (as I'd assume the population of HN is), then most people could be considered "dumb".

Before the assembly line, workers had to be skilled, had to really understand what they were building and how and why all its pieces fit together. With the advent of the assembly line, workers were only required to learn one specific, usually very simple, skill. That made them cheaper to train and cheaper to replace and made the outcome of their work less important to the end product. That also made them easier to manage by people who were not skilled artisans, giving rise to the "generic" manager, who only needs to know how to manage. Java is a very good "assembly line language" and it's no coincidence it's popular with businesses that don't value elegant code as much as code that gets the job done cheaply.

I'm not saying it's impossible to write elegant Java code. I'm only saying it's cheap to write business-y Java code and that accounts for a substantial part of its popularity.
Agreed. I also didn't see any planned release date.
"Not even remotely near the same thing. Can we agree to stop making crappy physical analogies, please?"

No, that is exactly the same thing. Private correspondence has the expectation of being private. Just because you have the technical ability to do something, doesn't mean you should.
What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions
Why? Do you have half a SSD to spare for checksums and additional metadata? Or does the common OS X user have several disks that he wants to see as a logical volume, while also understanding the risks after one of the dies? Do they even have the storage redundancy needed?
I use simpleDNS, they're a reseller of enom so its a bit more expensive but they have nice little additions and api integrations that are helpful if you're developing. UX is much more simpler.
That's pretty, but it doesn't look viral. One expects to see one point going to somewhere between 1 and a large number which spreads to somewhere between 1 and a large number and so on. It should look more chaotic and more like a fractal I'd think. This looks like one fan spread it to a huge number. So I'm guessing there is missing data e.g. the first fan getting too much credit.
The only ranking system that ever seems to matter is the generally assumed ranking within the public consciousness. It doesn't matter if John Doe University emerges from out of nowhere one year to unseat Harvard on some arbitrary list; the general public is still going to assume Harvard is a top school, and probably will not have heard of John Doe U.

As for the distinctions among the generally assumed top tier -- be it Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, or what have you -- these seem pretty irrelevant in praxis. Go to the school that interests you the most and is the best fit for you. If you should be so talented and lucky as to get into all of the best schools, you're probably the kind of person whose life isn't going to take a dramatic turn for the worse because some ranking system suddenly places your alma mater at #2 or #3.

The only two groups who place serious stock in the rankings are high schoolers and the chronically insecure.
In the 2010 Times Higher Education "top universities" list, Alexandria University in Egypt ranked ahead of Georgetown and Delft. It also beat out Harvard and Stanford in the subcategory that measured the impact of research (1). Here's what happened:

Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to “the high output from one scholar in one journal” — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor.

In 2009, an administrator at Clemson University in the U.S. revealed that the college had "... manipulated class sizes, artificially boosted faculty salary data and gave rival schools low grades in the rankings' peer reputation survey" with the goal of improving its U.S. News & World Report college ranking. This helped the university rise from #38 to #22 over a seven-year period (2). A few weeks ago, Emory University admitted it had also manipulated data/lied over a period of more than 10 years in order to improve its U.S. News & World Report ranking (3).

My takeaway from these incidents: Not only are university ranking systems imperfect to begin with, but it's also possible to game the system ... and it happens every year.

1. New York Times: "Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/education/15iht-educLede15...

2. USA Today: "Clemson official: School manipulated rankings "
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-06-04-clemson-ra...

3. Reuters: "Emory gave incorrect data to publications that rank U.S. colleges"
in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/17/usa-emory-ranking-idINL2E8JHNG320120817
"Yay Lawyers!" said no one.
College ranking: "Statistical absurdities and inherent mendacity"
No. Javascript is just a general purpose language. It could very well serve as a DSL for layout or presentation. But the browsers already have that, it's called HTML and CSS.

What I'm referring to is Javascript syntax. It's way too ambiguous which often leeds to programming errors. For instance: the global variables gaffe, the scope mess, the sloppy prototypal implementation, etc.

Hiding that behind a compiler doesn't make the problems go away. It makes them worse.
I don't think I've ever received the kind of email the poster is talking about. Is there something wrong with me?

Edit: I do get a reasonable number of cold(ish) recruitment emails, but they mostly seem to be for real jobs. I'm not seriously worried about not receiving lame proposals, although I appreciate the sympathetic thoughts :-)
I don't know much about China, sadly. Mostly, that's because of the language barrier.

I'm assuming that you know a lot about China. So, maybe you could link to some alternative views of China that are different from what we get from the western media. Like what's the startup scene like in China? What are the hot cities? Etc. I'm interested in it all.
The unicode consortium got unicode wrong, not java. At the time Java was created, there only was a BMP and Unicode had a purely 16-bit design. Therefore, it was perfectly reasonable for java to assume a 16-bit char. Unicode was later extended to support more than 2^16 characters, but that was after java was created, hence the need for UCS-2/UTF-16

Other languages which strongly value backwards compatibility and were created around the same time have the same issue - e.g.: C#/.NET, i believe python as well
I just checked my schedule and I think the best chance for me attending would be Sunday night after the keynote (it ends at 7:00PM) or Wednesday after 5:30PM. Tuesday would be almost undoable as I've got sessions until 8:30 and my hotel is in Oakland.

Anyone else?
Except for the parts where he predicted Java's failure and FreeBSD's dominance, I see no big problem. He even predicted Sun's fate.
How to Generate Graphical User Interface for Android Applications
Probably. Everyone gets them.
Something similar happened a few years ago with a bunch of UK planespotters. The Greeks are very touchy about military matters.
3 Year lurker here - created an account for the first time to say that this is the best advice with the most accurate context I've ever read on HN and maybe the entarwebz. Unfortunately, the tactic is 'out' now and I only have a day or so to take advantage of this.

"Linux sucks because making 4 monitors work correctly is not possible and on windows it was just 15 seconds rearranging squares on a screen."
The fuck is this doing on HN? flag...
You are right - the risk is of course that with a bad law on the books, the enforcement strategy could change at any moment.
Why would anyone bring up mysql?
> does a photo manager have to be 707 MB?

iPhoto 9.3.2 is 1.46GB.
How Google+ Could Win Me
Well, even the "create a wordpress blog for $100" kind of programmers get this kind of mails these days.
"the startups of Berlin seem to be driven purely by generic management graduates"

Best sentence I read about that. So true.