skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LEGO is just now (in process of) suing Czech Pirate Party on trademark grounds.

We (as in pirate party) made a pretty mediocre (IMO) ad before elections, which used CGI models that bore some resemblance to Lego figures.

They didn't like that. We think we are in the right; however, we don't particularly like LEGO corporation at this moment.

The ad was just on youtube and not in any TV or amything.
Because ruby sucks -- just kidding... I didn't know python devs even had much of an opinion about the ruby folks.
Avoid making a database connection when your request doesn’t need it. And when your request does need it, you should prefer mysql_pconnect() over mysql_connect() for the simple reason that it potentially shaves some execution time off the connection part.

Actually you should avoid using both mysql_pconnect and mysql_connect, because they're both functions from the deprecated old mysql library of database functions. The preferred way to deal with MySQL databases in 2012 is to use either PDO (http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdo.php) or the "improved MySQL" library (http://php.net/manual/en/book.mysqli.php), both of which are better architected and give you access to things like prepared statements that the old mysql library does not.

There's really no good reason to be using the old mysql library at this point. Unfortunately, however, there's a vast amount of ancient PHP tutorials, code snippets, and other copypasta floating around out there that uses it, so people who don't know better still pick it up.
That's the most delightful random act of kindness that I've seen in a while. Bravo Lego!
Best LEGO sets ever? GO!

SPACE POLICE
http://paperspaceships.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/lego.j...

and

Early-Mid 90s City jump offs
http://www.onetwobrick.net/2008/08/set-database-6541-interco...
Metals are much easier to recycle than paper products.

To recycle metals you might need to do a bit of pre-processing, grind up everything a bit, and throw it in a crucible to melt it down. 100% recyclable and the same as new when recast.

To recycle paper you have to make sure everything is sorted (no plastic, metal, etc in with your paper) and do a good amount of chemical processing and the end result isn't as easily like "new" paper.

I don't see how this gives cardboard the edge in recycled materials use for a bike.
He seems to have glossed over the Palestinian support for Nazi Germany during WWII.

And I found this section strange:

=====

By now Hamas was dominant and its military wing was ordering repeated car bombings of Israeli civilians.

...

But there was a nasty and dark side to what Sheikh Yassin and his fellow Islamists were up to in Gaza in the 1980s. They got a reputation for violently attacking anything that supported the PLO - rather than the Israelis.

=====

Apparently attacking Israeli civilians doesn't count as "nasty and dark"?
LayerVault launches GitHub and Dropbox integration
Anyone got a TLDR on this? It looks interesting, but I don't have the minutes to read it to get the juice.
This was a weirdly written article. Scientists have known for a long time that the Earth's magnetic field connects with the Sun's, and that along those connected paths stream a lot of ejected Sun material in the form of plasma. To call that a portal seems like a bizarre attempt at exciting public interest. The big discovery here, that was done by Scudder, was to have found places where that magnetic field connects with the Earth's magnetic field, called reconnection points. The other discovery was they appear transient, and to me was not surprising.
Quality bikes get resold after being stolen. Theft is the biggest reason, IMO, why cheap bikes are important.

Comfort on a bike, on well-maintained paved road, is mostly a matter of ergonomics - measurements, essentially.

Safety on a bike is mostly a matter of maintenance and fairly basic requirements of the materials and construction. Can it stop when you want it to? Will it stop suddenly when you don't want it to? Will the frame remain the same shape for the lifetime of the bike? Are the fasteners secure? This stuff isn't expensive and doesn't need to be.

I personally would never spend more than 200 USD equivalent on a new bike as a practical form of transport. Any more than that and thinking about security starts to dominate use, creating anxiety wherever you've chained it up, etc.

Oh, and cheapest brake pads? Here are some sold in the UK, free delivery, for 3.84 USD equivalent: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002VWP0FK

Too expensive? Here are some sold from Hong Kong, free delivery again, for 1.92 USD equivalent (half the price):
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270...

I'm fairly sure you could get these for a tenth the price buying them in bulk further upstream.
http://www.tumblr.com/theme/36037

Just anything that isn't light on dark.
If you're using a tool like Sandcastle to generate separate documentation, it won't produce decent output for elements that don't have XML comments. For that reason, while I also find those comments to be irritating I'm still in favor of a requirement that they be present for anything that's meant to be consumed by third parties.

Also, it sounds like some of the problem you're describing could have as much to do with people being slackers about the rule, than the rule itself. Someone should be taking charge of making sure these XML comments are useful, high-quality comments. There's almost always more information that should be provided beyond re-iterating the element's name. For example, the XML comments for a property named "IsValid" should reference some documentation of exactly what defines a valid state for that class. Numeric properties should very likely have notes about what unit denominates them. At the absolute least, make sure that every property's descriptive comment starts with "Gets", "Sets", or "Gets or sets".

Just to get in ahead of an obvious answer, let me also go ahead and say that if this is a situation where it's reasonable to tell users that they should just RTFS, then obviously this is a situation where there's not necessarily any need to require XML comments in the first place. But if you do need to require XML comments, you should also be requiring proper XML comments.
I get that our propensity for wishful thinking made it easy to underestimate the post-revolution popularity of Islamists, but their rise shouldn't have been that much of a surprise.

In Egypt at least, the Muslim Brotherhood had a number of pretty significant advantages compared to liberals and secularists. Whereas Mubarak basically crushed secularist dissent, he seemed to tolerate the Muslim Brotherhood (on a very short leash) for use as boogeymen. They were also able to organize in mosques, which were more or less untouchable, whereas nobody else had such a safe place to organize. Finally, the Mubarak regime was largely secularist, which tainted other liberals by association.

The end result was that, after the revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood had a very well-organized political network ready to go, while everyone else was going, "Hmm ... time to form a political party. How do we do that?"
Only 1 paragraph deals with PHP's reputation, the rest is geared towards those who actually want to learn PHP and/or improve their skills.

To you: doesn't the fact that you myopically dismissed the entire article due to a single paragraph say something about you? Why are you looking for a flamewar where one doesn't exist?

I get it -- you don't like PHP. That's your prerogative, and you're of course entitled to it, but this article isn't just another skirmishing ground for the flamewar that is "PHP SUCKS" vs. "NO IT DOESN'T". Rather, it looks to me to be more of a braindump from a PHP dev looking to enlighten new PHP devs with what he's learned.

Is that so patently offensive to you that you have to attempt and interject the played-out flamewar that is now a decade old?
Logging in Clojure / JVM Part 2
Over the summer my brother lent me his bike to use for a month or two. It is a 1974 Gitane racing/road bike, so nearly 40 years old, and it was still in fantastic shape. Practically zero visible rust, frame was still decently straight, etc. (I did have to replace a plastic gear in the derailleur)
I fail to understand how this made the front-page of HN.

A father sent an email to his children expressing his disdain. Email went viral in a way unanticipated by the daughter who made the email public. Some lame exposition is given on the basics of positive re-enforcement.

Nothing about this was interesting or mentally stimulating.
Another another another apology incoming.
PHP Pitfalls:
PHP
:D
That question is pretty hard to parse correctly, but if it means: "how do I keep up with all the interesting research out there in my field?" (and if your field == Information Security) then you should look into a subscription to ThinkstScapes (http://thinkst.com/thinkstscapes/)
Forget Disclosure — Hackers Should Keep Security Holes to Themselves

BY ANDREW AUERNHEIMER (weev)

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/hacking-choice-and-disc...
I think this tech could give robots much more data from physical human contact.
Because python devs look down on everybody :)
He did say that he had a product ready to demo but they didn't want to see it.

Selling yourself is almost as important as the idea, if you have the best idea in the world but you seem a bit wishy washy then no one is going to be interested, but if you can sell yourself and get them to believe almost anything is possible in your hands then you're in with a better chance.
That's preferences expressed at an individual level. That's fine. The problem is when you say in aggregate "only girls will like this toy, you are boy, ergo you shouldn't want this" and have marketing that either excludes or strongly suggests the toy you want is Not For You.

See the comments in this very thread about boys bullied for playing with "girl" toys. That's the awful consequence of stupid and inane gendering.
Wired's Favorite Tech-Company Holiday Party Invites
The Future of Ruby: a RubyConf Recap
Damn. That's a bit nutty. So they obviously don't hire devs-turn-journalists. Probably cost too much.
Favorite: Apple's Directions.
The half-life of facts
They keep track of how many pages you've read in cookies. Delete your cookies. No reason for brash hostility.
Thanks man, "voice authentication" isn't what I am looking for-- but Mistral (from what i've seen) has a recognition! I'm going to look into it further to see if it recognizes a pattern vs can distinguish between 2-3 voices. But thanks so much!
Oh sure, I agree that the western media was very optimistic about stuff like secularism (when it wasn't scaremongering about the muslim brotherhood).

Maybe I'm just an old cynic, but expecting the best possible outcome from a revolution seems naive. It's what everyone goes in hoping for, maybe what the revolting masses intend, but in the power vacuum that follows then someone or some group will fill it with a 'strong' leader. This leader then proceeds to take the place in his own direction, usually protected by a combination of true believers and self-interested hangers-on. Which then screws over most of the people that got them there. Look at the Iranian revolution - many female students took part in that one, only to find themselves far worse off afterwards.

The fact we only have a potential despot in Egypt so far is actually really positive!
Does Snapchat offer safe sexting from smartphones, or a false sense of security?
Presenting the New Add-ons Site
So the person that down-voted without explaining why either thinks that there has been a lack of vitriol or thinks that anecdotal evidence in the negative outweighs the plethora of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. We'll never know because this has developed into the usual inevitable flame fest.
tl;dr: guy wanted domain zap.com, owned by a hedge fund. he tried emailing and calling people there with no luck. he decided to spend many thousands of dollars flying from london to NYC to meet with CEO. got shot down again, ended up getting email to CEO by blindly bccing different formats, CEO asked for business plan. domain is still owned by hedge fund.
Translation: Responsible press delivers an oversize helping of facts to people who possess a marked dislike for facts.
Everything stems from the fact South attempts to freeze your model definitions in time for each migration. While this works, often you need more than just the model definition (what effectively generates the DDL), but the surrounding codebase / Django magic as well (methods, model managers, etc.).

Another pain point with South is that you run your migrations after pushing a new release. That makes for hard zero-downtime updates, because your codebase and the database are out of sync for a while before you can run `django-admin.py migrate`.

After having used South, I feel the best approach still is to write your own SQL migrations by hand and run it against your database pre-deploy, never destroy data (erase/update columns/tables), and then make sure your codebase handles the new/absent columns/tables transparently. This way you can revert a broken release just pushing the previous version.
I'm unsure why this is on the HN front page, but while it's there I'll throw in an opinion...

If the father had done a better job parenting instead of permissively coddling his children or allowing others to parent them, he would never have had to write this email.

Parenting is coaching. It's a process of constantly weening children from dependency after dependency. It can be tough when they cry at every rule you put in place and at every missed chocolate or toy or tv show. But you have to be firm, stay true to your vision, and view yourself as saving your children from "the tyranny of their own desires".

If you want it done right, you can't do it from a distance. You can't oursource the effort by sending them off to boarding school and hope someone else will do your job for you.

It's not easy. I have 3 of my own. Perhaps the hardest thing to do is to realize that the way your kids turn out is largely due to how effectively you and your partner parent. Yes they make their own choices. But they should make those choices within a framework of confidence, intelligence and independence that you as a parent have cultivated.

That's a lot of responsibility. But you have to take it on if you want to increase the chances of your children having good lives.

Waiting until they're 40 to write them an email expressing your disappointment is far too little way too late.
Html5 canvas game for github game-off-2012
Roundlanders is a physics( Box2D ) game using the arrow keys or your device accelerometer to move roundlanders to the end of the level
You don’t even need serverside debuggers or fancy instrumentation to achieve this. The function microtime() returns a timestamp in microseconds. This makes it easy for you to check the passage of time at key points during your application’s execution path.

Yes, that's just as good as a real profiler.
Some zip codes have more than one municipality within them.

For example: https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipLookupResultsAction!input.actio...
I like this idea. However, I wonder how a court would interpret illegal activities undertaken by other users on your hotspot...
This reeks of rampant selectivity and trolling by making sweeping generalizations then choosing very specific examples that "poke holes" in the chosen sacred cow.

For instance:
On Linux:
"It can be very difficult to get hardware accelerated 3D, wireless drivers, and suspend working reliably in Linux depending on the hardware you have and which version of which distro you are using."

You can same the same thing about any OS, they all have their own special set of things they "struggle" at doing. Just replace Linux with Windows/Apple and distro with version/Big Cat and it's also true.

On Lisp:

"Common Lisp has a lot of historical baggage, and it lacks the breadth of community library support that some languages such as Python, Ruby, and C have."

Best programming language doesn't necessarily mean most useful. It's a red herring. Python et. al. have their own share of problems, e.g. the Python 2 -> Python 3 conversion.

On IDEs vs. Emacs:
"IntelliJ has many advantages over Emacs when it comes to editing Java."

Having written more Java than I care to admit in free form text editors, yes, Java IDEs tend to be superior for writing Java code. They just have a hard time doing anything else other than Java code.
There's still startup booths at this huge national conference
Did you just refer to the Consumerist as an ad agency?
Startup cloud app Younity aims to take on iCloud
Properly not, but then so wouldn't most newspapers, most of the time.

That kind of reporting is expensive, both directly and indirectly (in terms of goodwill and access to politicians). Newspapers are burning too much money now that they no longer have a monopoly on news (and, more importantly, ads) so they have to cut costs -- and the easiest thing to cut is the kind of expensive reporting that we really need them for.

I am almost always downvoted when I say so, but the NYT is not a good paper anymore, it has become a rag -- it may still only print what is fit to print, but it has long ago stopped printing exactly the kind of news they should be printing -- and which I would have been willing to pay for.
Show HN: A Dead-Simple Dead-Drop (so Petraeus won't have to use GMail)
Where to host my website now? Is PaaS for me?
I've been meaning to try OpenGarden and I agree to some extent that OpenGarden might be a better solution. However I think the mobile hotspot such as Karma, Freedom, etc offer the benefit of not chewing through your smartphone's battery and your plan's data limits.
Those are cherrypicked examples. 15 years ago they still had the custom horse, dragon, stone wall, etc pieces and today they still have sets of just plain pieces.
I still disagree that this is at all a new found thing. There is a reason building codes had to be drafted requiring exits to open out on buildings, after all. (So, really, the design of the door shouldn't even matter. Adults can remember that the main doors open out, right? :) )

I mainly question if it is truly a sign of a problem, as seems implicated by it being brought up. Still seems to me that it just happens because the cost for doing so is essentially nil.
Spent lots of time and money stalking a big time hedge fund manager in an attempt to acquire Zap.com domain. Failed to acquire domain, but still considers this a "life hack" because the manager downloaded his business plan.

Later, messed up one question in YC interview and got rejected.

Baffling...
If you recommend this then your customers wouldn't need a todo list :)
Thank you. You've just described one of the top three reasons I left my industrial design program for computer science.
Obviously I'm not saying that, but it's a reasonably good method of determining how certain parts of your code perform.
Dude, Fat talked about the same topic at dotJS. Funny
First social hotspot? So not at all like FON then?

Edit: I don't see any U.S. sites in the FON coverage map, and the 4g aspect is genuinely new.
The background images are user submitted, but we limit to 400kB to keep a good quality, these are photographers after all ;)
Good for him. Hopefully he can be "safe" in relatively short order.
That's absolutely true, but I was using the generic MySQL lib as a kind of common-ground illustration. The actual point translates just as well to any other DB library. Establishing a connection to the server and issuing queries takes a lot of time and often times it's done for all requests even if some of them don't need fresh DB data.
Here's the full discussion on refinements as well: http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085
Just because he was not successful (yet) does not mean it was a foolish effort. It's attitudes like yours that make hustling work, simply because so few people are willing to even send an email to somebody because they think it's unlikely they'll get an affirmative response. Getting rejected is like ketchup on french fries.
Could it be? Does this mean my wife and I can use our unlocked iPhones with voice-only (t-mobile, maybe?) sim cards and use this Karma thing as our data plan? We're paying US$15/mo each for 200MB data. It's ridiculous. And, we're on HSPA+, not even LTE (AT&T, don't even ask; I can have full bars and it still takes forever to load up text-heavy pages).
This... is very, very similar to this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/04/voyager_one_arrives_...

Same phenomenon. Different scales. And evidently two research groups at NASA who don't talk.
To more directly answer your question, it's more a problem of needing to remember an unnecessarily large number of names - in addition to the class variables numberOfElves and reindeerArray from my example, I now need to keep track of twice as many names. Also, admittedly, after the first 5 or 10 repetitions of the same assignment, I know what all the valid solutions look like, so obfuscating the code by putting little chunks of code in separate methods makes it harder to read (but that's a readability problem specific to marking assignments).
How will the series A crunch affect the job market?
Yeah: "<amazing headline claim>, inventor says" is the first sentence, and my heart fell.
Mindstorms is a brilliant product. They used it to teach robotics for undergrad IT at university. I built a machine that could play blackjack (light sensor moved over the pips of a playing card, discovering the card value). It was brilliant.
Oaktree Memo from our Chairman
Raspberry Pi: Inside the Pi factory
Spot on. Seem to have forgotten to address the 'to your advantage' bit in the question. It's a bit rash jumping on the first plane out before even sending out a speculative email to find out if they'll disclose a price tag for it, which can be budgeted for at a later date.
Because he doesn't want to poison the well. You get more impartial answers by asking without putting in your own opinion. "Hey, what do you think about X? Personally I think it's really dumb, but what about you?"
Toshiba Launches $350 Excite 10 SE Tablet with Android 4.1
Why miniature? Hook into the MFLs with some big coils and you can drag pretty much anything through the field. The sun's magnetic field is immensely powerful compared to anything we're familiar with on earth.
The father's pattern of behavoir is interesting here. He was absent when his children were young and then sent them off to boarding school and didn't stay in touch. Now their lives are not going as well as he'd like, so he's decided to excoriate them for their decisions. What authority does he have for this? He earned the money for their expenses when they were young, but he was otherwise completely uninterested in their upbringing. Now he's going to parachute in and make demands. Fathering children does not make you a father.
> a very high learning curve for doing things correctly

What? Can you give a single example?
To your half-hearted comment: show me a language where an unexperienced programmer can't create security issues, bugs, memory leaks and so on.

The author is just giving some good advice to PHP programmers. If you don't like it, just don't read it.
Would love to hear the other two!
Likewise, Mindstorms was one of the big reasons I got into "real" programming. Before Mindstorms, I played with a lot of web stuff (mostly HTML and some gaudy JS). But with Mindstorms, I started doing real programming work. First with their "block builder", then moving into Not-Quite-C. Programming the Mindstorms was super fun and super frustrating...nothing quite like working on an embedded device with limited memory and processing as a 12 year old. Plus the robot itself would typically tear itself apart from too much torque.

Mindstorms also propelled me into science fair, where several of my projects were Mindstorm-based robotics. And science fair is what propelled me into science in general, leading me to a career in biology and computer science.

So, basically, <3 Mindstorms.