skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading this article makes me think maybe Kenya isn't as backwards as I imagined.
Title should be: "NY newspaper runs interactive map with names, addresses of handgun permit holders"

You do not need to read beyond the first ten words to realize this:

"The map indicates the addresses of all pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. Each dot represents an individual permit holder licensed to own a handgun — a pistol or revolver"

In order to have a rational debate on improving gun control we need to use words correctly...
And makes it easier for criminals to avoid houses with guns, thus putting the non gun population at risk.
I think it's doing fine on the web (think enterprise) and mobile (Android). Can't comment on embedded devices, since I'm not too familiar with embedded development.
Don't forget about type synonyms. ComplexDataStructure might be better called FilesystemAffinityMap. In general, if you have a bunch of functions which operate on ComplexDataStructure, you serve your future-self and others if you give your type signatures stronger semantic meaning.

That said, the choice of a C++ map as your example is unfortunate but illustrative. :)

The bog-standard mapping type in C++ is std::map, which has a method like this:

T& operator[]( const Key& key );

One might think, based on the type and how this works in other programing languages and even from reading other people's code, writing `mymap[foo]` would just be an access. But it's not! If the `key` is not in the map, it inserts an item T, presumably calling the default constructor.

It's a good example of how, in general, the semantics of a lookup for a non-existent key varies by language. You have to use std::map::find() in C++, which returns an iterator which will equal std::map::end(). Python generates a KeyError exception (!). In Ruby and Clojure, you get nil, but note that you can have nil values in a map. :) Java returns null.

The Haskell signature for lookup is this:

k -> Map k a -> Maybe a

What's going to happen is encoded in the type system. In general Haskell is good about this; Maybe indicates possibility of failure, lists suggest nondeterminism, etc.

That said, as others have pointed out, Haskell functions often end up being really generic. The language sort of pushes you in the direction of not specializing on types but rather putting looser restrictions, like typeclasses, on them. Type synonyms can help, too, as mentioned above.
Wow! Sounds expensive, must be worth it.
Is there evidence or any cases of criminals doing informational background searches on their targets?
I think the trend is definitely away from user-replaceable CPUs. Some enthusiasts say it's "sad", but it's just part of a general trend towards integration on a larger scale. You can't replace a broken transistor on your Intel 4004 either.
I thought there architecture was pretty interesting for 2008 and the amount of data trying to be indexed/stored. It has some pretty traditional concepts that seem to work well along with a few cool tweeks like udp broadcast for object discovery.
Does anyone know anymore about this and or can explain what the relation is between frame rates and survey data?

"User experience (quantified through high speed cameras mapping frame rates to user survey data)"
If you know you're on a network -- and Dropbox does -- then I'd fetch the time from a time server somewhere, perhaps Dropbox itself, or time.nist.gov. Of course, then you're at the mercy of the user's hosts file, I suppose.

If the time is just used to check for certificate expiration, maybe nobody considers it worth worrying about. Which I guess is fine as far as it goes... but the other day I couldn't get Dropbox to do its thing when my clock was only a few hours off. It didn't seem likely that an SSL date check was involved in that case.
> Actually, I kind of wish IO was split up a bit... I have been meaning to play with rolling some typeclasses (with an IO instance and a testing instance) that wrap up IO of various types, so I define my functions in terms of these and spot what kind of IO various functions might do - I'm not yet sure how much of a win it will be, but it seems like something to explore.

There's a section on this practice in Real World Haskell: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/programming-with-monad...
Free the photos
Anybody that goes to the Ukraine to have their brains infused with stem-cells is suffering from a lot more than just a fear of Alzheimers. The kind and number of complications that come to mind (assuming the treatment itself doesn't do anything at all) make it an absolute no-brainer (pun unavoidable).

And if it does something it likely isn't going to be positive. Desperate people are easy victims, if you know someone that is even considering something like this please do them a favour and talk them out of it before something bad happens.
I like the thing. I was really looking for it. I'll test it soon on my project.

but,

"and I haven’t got Opera to test it on" ???

We are at 2012, fast internet, unlimited storage blah blah etc. and most importantly you are a developer! And you are still hiding to behind of this sentence? It's not cool man. It's unacceptable.
I imagine there's a tipping point with countries defaulting whereby suddenly the entire complexion of the sovereign debt market changes radically and every nation needs to rethink its fiscal policy. Maybe Ireland could do it, but if say Spain were to follow suit...
>To be honest, it's really residency training programs that have become too long

This is true, but it would also be a good idea to move toward a more European-style system that creates an alternate path to the M.D. by making the first two years of med school equivalent to an undergrad major. So a student at, say, the University of Washington could do their first two years of med school from 20 – 22, their second two from 22 – 24, and a three-year residency afterwards, leaving them with less debt (because they'd pay undergrad tuition) and with a faster path to an actual career.

This sort of thing is hugely important to me because I wrote an essay called "Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school" (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-beco...) which explains what numerous med students, residents, and doctors say they wish someone had told them.

Part of the essay includes this:

Once I realized how nasty the residency match process is and how fundamentally unfair the labor market for residents is, I was shocked: residency programs have formed a cartel designed to control cost and reduce employee autonomy, and hence salaries. I only went to law school for a year, by accident, but even I know enough law and history to recognize a very clear situation of the sort that anti-trust laws are supposed to address in order to protect workers. When my friend entered the match process like a mouse into a snake’s mouth, I became curious, because the system’s cruelty, exploitation, and unfairness to residents is an obvious example of employers banding together to harm employees. Lawyers often get a bad rap in our society, and sometimes for good reasons, but a case like this looked ripe to me.

It turns out that I’m not a legal genius and that lawyers have noticed this anti-trust violation. So an anti-trust lawsuit was filed. You can read about it in the NYTimes, including a grimly hilarious line about how “The defendants say the Match is intended to help students and performs a valuable service.” Ha! A valuable service to employers, since employees effectively can’t quit or negotiate with individual employers. Yes, indeed, curtailing employee power by distorting markets is a valuable service. The article also noted this bit of regulatory capture:
"why does America have such huge air con usage and England none?"

Because a significant part of America is hot, and England is not(I had lived in England for years). It is not an "It will be fine if we install AC", but an "if we don't install air conditioner we will die" and I am being serious here, Las Vegas would be inhabited without AC .

Also England is wet so this means that before cooling the air, you will have to condense the water, and that takes lots of energy, making them inefficient in UK.

South of North America is very hot in summer but also dry, so it is very efficient in energy consumption.

35c on multiple days!! That is nothing. In most of Spain you will get 40-45 peaks with 35c minimum over months in summer, very few clouds for three months.
Of course, the same can be said for at least two years of pre-medschool time in college.
You Are Your Number One User
>This is a fantastic idea.

True, but the really radical shift would come from another direction, as I wrote in a separate comment:

It would also be a good idea to move toward a more European-style system that creates an alternate path to the M.D. by making the first two years of med school equivalent to an undergrad major. So a student at, say, the University of Washington could do their first two years of med school from 20 – 22, their second two from 22 – 24, and a three-year residency afterwards, leaving them with less debt (because they'd pay undergrad tuition) and with a faster path to an actual career.

This sort of thing is hugely important to me because I wrote an essay called "Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school" (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-beco...) which explains what numerous med students, residents, and doctors say they wish someone had told them.
Corruption isn't.
A decent-sized house with a decent-sized lawn still costs around $200k.
Can non-handicapped children watch sesame shows on am Android tablet?
I forgot about differences between health care systems. In the one I know of (NL), AFAIK every type 1 diabetic who wants one and can handle using one gets a pump and insulin for free (my sample is N=3; replacement batteries, you have to pay, IIRC)

That makes sense, as companies are almost giving glucose meters away (in my N=3 sample, at least one owns more than one pump) to gain/keep market share for their 'razors', and as they improve quality of life so much for a relatively modest sum of money.

Also, suppose that you find the perfect formula for determining insulin intake. How are you going to apply it without an automated device?
I remember using the SAMs books (which make the list). I learned more from correcting the errors, of which there were many, than I did from the books themselves. Simply horrid books that should have had much more time spent on editing.
I understand that, but they're written with code. Maybe I'm wrong but that pretty clearly makes the writing of them "coding".
Eh, Fiber is expensive. It's getting better, though; a big part of the expense is the skill required to splice fiber, and they are developing better and easier ways to splice all the time. I betcha the last mile is going to suck for most people for a long time. And you know? I don't think it matters as much as we think. If it does matter for you (It matters for me, certainly) you will move to the places where fiber is available. Yeah, google fiber gets all the press, but surewest has been doing fiber to the home in Sacramento for close to a decade now. (I mean, fiber matters a lot to me, but not enough for me to move to Kansas... or Sacramento, for that matter. Ugh.)

Here in silicon valley, both the city of Palo Alto and the city of Santa Clara (see http://svpfiber.com or email me if you want to get in on an in-progress project) have municipal fiber rings. It's aimed at businesses, and /only/ does the last mile (which is to say, once you get to the data centre you will still have to pay someone for transit to the internet. And you will have to pay to trench to your house, so you are probably looking at $500/month minimum and maybe $10K one time to trench in to your house. Still, worth it to not live in Sacramento. Ugh.)

I mean, what I'm trying to say is that there are really good tubes, here in America. I, myself, have 12 gigabits of burst capacity (a 6.2 gigabit commit) Yes, our last mile for most people is shit. But the last mile for everyone, everywhere is shit. Just like in Africa, I personally predict that it's going to be wireless, for most of us. And for most of you? wireless is just fine. I mean, yeah, cheap fiber for everyone like they are said to have in Japan, or in Kansas or in Sacramento would be super great, but I don't think that only having that in a few places will cripple us. I mean, when it really matters, even here in America, if fiber matters to you, you can get it by paying a small (compared to developer salaries) fee, or by moving somewhere unpleasant.
If you're using ELB in front of anything, look out. It's currently 100% down for production traffic on many sites, luckily we moved quickly to work around the issue.
Don't forget corporations' fear of class-action suits. Even when the average plaintiff gets $nil the presence of class action suits might save their life by dissuading a corporation from doing harm in the first place.
I learned everything I knew before I got a job as a programmer from Codecademy. I've learned vastly more by actually doing things, but the basis I needed to get started I learned fantastically with CA.

I think it's also gotten way better from when I first started using it. The jQuery lessons are fantasticly useful, and the Python courses go way deeper and are far more useful than the original Javascript courses I first did.
Did learning to fly give bats super-immunity?
and for every page there is an apple
Burglars routinely monitor the obituaries for dates of funerals to break into houses while the funeral is taking place.

For instance:

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20120330/NEWS01/703309874

But there are many more examples of that. For criminals information is a competitive edge, just like for everybody else.

The safe bet is that they exploit that edge to the maximum of their abilities to increase their rewards.
Looking for web design apprenticeship
Looking for a web design/development mentor preferably in the Bay Area but willing to work with someone over Skype.

I have basic knowledge but wanting to take it to the next level and change careers.
Do you ever look at the popular photos, or do you just look at your feed of friends photos?
When you do view with a 3rd party client, do you view your friends photo feed, the popular feed, or both?
I have no problem with Google sending me targeted ads. If they do it well, I'll happily support the business model and make them money. That's a completely different proposition than giving away personally identifiable information.

>If you are going to sue then you have to wonder what it is that you want to achieve!

In the above scenario of them illegally selling my private communications to the highest bidder, I would want damages to 1) sufficiently compensate me for any violations of my privacy and 2) provide a powerful disincentive to other companies who might consider taking similar actions, thus shifting the game theory of mass consumer social businesses. In order to achieve the second of these aims, criminal charges for the offending parties would be more effective than mere financial penalties.

> Terms and conditions as a rule contain a clause that says that they can be amended at some point in the future. That alone makes most t&c completely meaningless and giving a company a large amount of data on you is a risky proposition at best.

Fortunately there are laws beyond T&C click-throughs. I support strengthening those laws in regards to any kind of of privacy bait and switches. In cases where I have a reasonable amount of trust in the company (e.g. Google), I'll use the service. But I'll still support legal protections, the EFF and those who call out underhanded companies.

Call me naive if you like, but I prefer that response to taking an RMSesque one-man stand by simply not using the tools the rest of the world is adopting.
Thank you for the article. Many of us share the hatred for Microsoft Corporation but perhaps we should let go of the M$ shorthand out of context?
Disagree that Codecademy doesn't focus on product, agree with all your suggestions though. When attempting to master a skill, nothing should be viewed in a vacuum.
In 2004, python wasn't exactly mainstream and didn't have as many mature web frameworks and libraries as today in 2012.

I'd say (and want to believe) in 2020, haskell and clojure would become a lot more popular.
Let's get Alexander McCall Smith on this right away!

Perhaps a whole new series of novels based on the concept of the "The No. 1 Ladies' Geek Startup" ?
What percentage of geeks are vegetarian?
In theory there should be nothing wrong with putting already-publicly available data online in a format digestible by the general public. The issue is that we put permit holders on a public list in the first place. These are law abiding citizens who have registered their guns legally. Making the information public, especially in stunts like this, does nothing but dissuade people from registering their firearms to avoid being targeted like criminals by overzealous neighbors and overeager journalists.
I find ack slow and overcomplicated (in implementation at least). As an alternative consider:

http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/findrepo
Well tell that to the local oil monopoly in Venezuela....whose coffers are being raided to feed populist urges.
15 Famous Child Geniuses
Ha! I still have a Schildt C/C++ book on my shelf. I used it back when I was learning C with Mark Williams C on my Atari ST. Probably about time to retire it to the landfill.
But at least they have guns to defend themselves!
Hey this is really good, thank you for sharing it! I've already started reading the stoics book.
That is quite affordable to a developer in the Midwest.
Learning Atari Action
Thank you very much Greg, would you do that in SF, if it was you?
Thank you, checking out right now!
If a criminal can gather information about his target easily, simply and anonymously, it would be stupid for him (or her) not to do so.

AFAIK police departments everywhere have been advising people for at least five decades to be sure someone picks up your mail and newspapers if you're planning to be away, because criminals will realize that nobody lives in or checks up on a house if the mailbox is overflowing.

Haven't you ever seen the scene in the original "Home Alone" where the Wet Bandits are casing the neighborhood before they hit the houses?
Self driving cars is far more sexy project than this. The PR that universities got from that will be way way more than for this.
A Swedish e-bay type of service recently got in trouble with the press for allowing private sellers of guns to post their phone numbers in the ads.

The reasoning behind this was that criminals could use the phone number to figure out where the sellers lived, and go steal their guns.

Funny how these things differ between places.
Not sure if you are kidding but I am pretty sure Kenya wasn't THAT bad. It's actually a fairly stable country, even with the high level corruption scandals and occasional election violence.
This is irrelevant. The really dangerous ones are the video-game players.
> One day in the name of a better UX you add an AJAX component to
> this, and forget to copy across that check into the ajax endpoint.
> Suddenly I can change anyone's username, despite not being an admin.

Your AuthContext library sounds like a very unusual solution to this problem. Yes, there should be a single, unduplicated piece of code that restricts users' ability to edit each others' usernames. But why does that code need to know where the user is in the software? Surely admin users can always edit other users' names regardless of whether they're in the admin panel, and the question of whether or not to show the UI for editing usernames is a front-end concern. It sounds like an unusual and unnecessary tight coupling between the front-end and the back-end.

> Having an object that does a lot of stuff is not necessarily the
> much-feared "God object", although it certainly can become that.
> I've learned to become more fearful of the "God methods" instead

I'd argue that both are more or less equally harmful symptoms of the same problem: code that isn't clean. There are a couple of paragraphs about this in Clean Code that I like:

> At the same time, many developers fear that a large number of small,
> single-purpose classes makes it more difficult to understand the
> bigger picture. They are concerned that they must navigate from class
> to class in order to figure out how a larger piece of work gets
> accomplished.

> However, a system with many small classes has no more moving parts
> than a system with a few large classes. There is just as much to
> learn in the system with a few large classes. So the question is: Do
> you want your tools organized into toolboxes with many small drawers
> each containing well-defined and well--labeled components? Or do you
> want a few drawers that you just toss everything into?
Well, its still a work-in-progress, and more importantly, a side-project, so I'll get around to it in time :)
> What would you like him to do, apologize

If you had stopped there, I'd have said yes.

.

> To expect every employee to know details of every issue

I ... had no such expectation?
Just checked out your response. Thank you!
Dotcom’s Megabox to Launch “A Few Months” After Mega
... whoooooooops.

Sorry. Thanks for explaining. `:(`
See out all the Christmas pranks happening all around the world through photos.
Quite right. My bad.
iOS does it that way. My iPod touch always forgets date and time when it runs out of battery. After restart you can't do anything in the App Store or on https websites before you've set the correct date (it defaults to 1970 which is when the iPod was first introduced I believe).
Frankly, I have to agree with another post. I can care less about what the color of your skin is, are you intelligent? That is really all that matters in the end. And with really rare exception this is how I have seen true high tech businesses. The ignorant care about skin color, race etc, the rest of us care about you abilities and that is all.

It is sad to me anyone cares about anything other than your ability to deliver. It is equally as sad that people sue over race when really it is someones inability to do the job. Regardless of your race, religion or color.
"Law abiding citizens" follow the law even if it doesn't please them.
Are assault rifles licensed separately?
It might instead persuade people to register their firearms, if criminals use the data to avoid these houses.
How could it possibly be easier to quit your job?

If I want to quit my job all I have to is not show up to work and eventually, after a few attempts at communication, they will send me a form letter and my final paycheck and remove me from the list of active employees.

Of course, being a more polite sort, I'd probably at least email my manager that I wouldn't be coming back.

But seriously, how could it be easier?
This is absolutely terrible. This is a perfect example of the persecution gun owners fear when they're asked to register their weapons. We need more gun registration and exposing data like this does nothing but hinder that goal.
Inspirational Quotes
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” Eleanor Roosevelt