skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
well, i don't feel like a loser. but then i've never thought of comparing myself using $$ job and status.

i'd suggest growing up a bit. get some more perspective on life. do something different. broaden your outlook.

you might also consider counselling. perhaps there are "issues" about trying to please parents or whatever.

what i'm saying is that what's broken is not how you evaluate yourself (winner or loser), but that you're actually doing the comparison at all. people are different. value different things, want different things, care about different things. you can't put them in a line.
A modern smartphone with a battery which lasts more than a week.
In other news a friend of mine actually earned 600$ in 1.5 hours by selling a static html5 website (he had a site in his portfolio the client asked him to make the same ) to a client on odesk.
I ran an offshore datahaven in the North Sea in 2000-2002 (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.07/haven.html), worked in the Caribbean (Anguilla) to do open-source crypto before that (due to legal restrictions on US citizens, it was pretty complex; I could describe systems in "papers" but couldn't actually work on the production code), and was at MIT before that.

2003 I did some NFC payments stuff, consulting, and generally discovered the Bay Area, and 2007-2008 I worked for a bubblicious facebook app/ad network.

I spent 2004-2008 and 2008-2010 doing tech stuff in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar Bahrain, and some other countries. Very much less "tech" in the software sense, mainly satellite communications, some IP networking, lots of politics, logistics, and security.

Now I'm working on a tech startup in silicon valley which is about to launch, which is kind of a big change.

I kind of miss working outside the US, and on physical infrastructure instead of just software and networks.
Could You Build A Kickstarter for Political Donations
Yes and no. They also use it to buy and store commodities, in the believe that money will devalue and it is better to store it as gold or similar. This line of thinking pretty much creates no value - the money does get kept in a underground vault, albeit rarely in the shape of a swimming pool.

Where any investment happens also matters - I suspect that recently most of the value of investments have gone to raising the quality of living conditions for the middle classes in China and India, rather than in America or Western Europe. In a sense, the planting is being done overseas, and the harvesting is happening at home. One may argue that this is morally desirable, but it's not clear that it is the outcome that would be chosen by enlightened American or European self-interest.

Interest rates being as low as they are also seems to imply that there are few solid value-creating investments to be had at home in a retail sense - otherwise it would be trivial to invest money at a higher rate of interest and become quickly more rich.

One final point - money is power. When money is so heavily concentrated in the hands of very few people, you have the same very few people being very powerful economically and picking winners and losers. This happens to be exactly the problem that a lot of people who are for market-driven economies have with socialism/communism - power concentrated is too prone to failure and not as great a driver for progress as power diluted.
I think the Keynesian contention right now is exactly that anyone who has money at this moment is choosing not to invest it in things that will employ people.

That is, despite record low interest rates, most people and corporations who have money are in fact choosing to "keep it under the mattress", refusing to invest it. There are lots of companies out there sitting on mountains of cash, not spending it.

Of course, they're not literally keeping it under the mattress. They instead keep it in extremely low yielding US treasuries, which is the economic equivalent. Now, if the government was to invest this money which they are able to borrow so cheaply, that might change things... This would be the "fiscal stimulus" that many Keynesian economists are advocating until employment and/or inflation both go up.

Of course this is not in itself an argument for increased taxation on the rich. That's an orthogonal issue, IMHO.
Ithkuil - A constructed philosophical language
quote:"[Romania] ain't even that European"

No kidding.
This simply shows your ignorance about Europe.
It's not just an OO thing. If you're using conditionals, you might actually want something else - a dispatch table, for example. Thinking about alternatives to conditionals will probably result in better code most of the time, but actually trying to go if-less seems forced.
Dealing with IT Budget cuts in 2013
how does "try to use less X because Y" become "don't use X"? and why is this considered good?

to clarify: my question "why is this considered good?" isn't about "if-less programming", but about taking ideas to dumb extremes.
Yes, the rich invest their money. But if we accept the guess that the economy is becoming less labor intensive and more global, their investment does do less to create american jobs, because it makes more sense to invest in such places.

Also, even for the same investment: financing a construction of a house, a 100K dollar paid by someone to buy a house, gives more social value than rich guy saving 100K that are being lent as a mortgage.

And of course there's the problem of concentration of power via money , vs distributed power.
After you've done it once or twice, you will have a list of the components you prefer and that works for your style, as a starting point. I find that for my personal projects, that list is very different both in size and contents of what Rails pulls in.

Another big difference to me is coupling: In theory Rails might be modular, but because of what Rails is, while you may be free to tear out ActiveRecord for example, it takes very little before you're knee deep in dealing with shit from 3rd party code that assumes the default stack. If you can't rely on all the Rails plugins and extensions, and you want to replace a major component of Rails, then there's suddenly a lot less reason to use it at all.
You did not read the article, by no means I suggest to get rid of the IFs completely.
Mystery Google Device Appears in Small-Town Iowa | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
WingIDE for Python...
Notepad++ for other tasks
In general, this kind of don't-use-this patterns are not very constructive. It reminds of this obsession of not having global objects at all cost. And we end up with singletons, static classes, etc. that are all just global objects in disguise. If I need a global, I use a global and call it that, same if I need an if/else statement.

It's an interesting article though, especially the conclusion: "Any language construct must be used when it is the more reasonable thing to do. I like the fact that the presence of if-s can indicate a bad OO design."
"Tell me about one of your weaknesses..."

At this point, hand the interviewer a card you had pre-prepared, which reads "My over-preparation sometimes comes across as arrogance".
This is an interesting idea and I think it's interesting to have it somewhere in mind while programming.

A few thought though :

- If you really push this to the extreme, you'll end up with all the logic hidden in the classes inheritance hierarchy. I'm not sure this is more readable/extensible than if/else statements.

- Most of the example given by the author to use "language features" are just syntactic sugar. Using collection.select instead of collection.each or || instead of if else is really just a matter of notation. I doesn't reduce the number of test cases required for your code and it might lead to "magical" one-liners that you have to read 20 times to understand.
Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See - a 40-minute crash course in Design Thinking
Show HN: Easiest way to share mobile photos during a party
Sure, Tata was originally a steel company and while it's a huge conglomerate now that does a bunch of other things, they're not known for pushing the edges of software development. There's no reason they have to be, unless you're referring to the somewhat ridiculous "salt-to-software" term the author has sprinkled on the article.
Blogger Sued Over Rape Story Reaches Settlement
I'd be content if they added back the feed/folder autocomplete on the search box which was removed after the UI refresh.
I was unaware that the Isle of Wight had any unusual political status....
Going through the filesystem and finding supposedly 'deleted' images and videos is in no way 'reverse engineering', as claimed by Mr. Spiegel (although Apple most likely would like you to believe that), it's just a normal Possibility one must account for when creating an App such as Snapchat/Poke.

"[...] those who enjoyed the service the most would not go to such lengths to view videos." - Maybe not the intended users, but with a Smartphone connected to a Malware-Infected PC, possibilities for spreading of those "supposedly deleted" pictures open up.
No! This practice is absolutely terrible! Object-oriented programming _can_ allow you to make if-free programs, but it will cost you readability/maintainability. Many people have been fighting against the overuse of inheritance and oo patterns that emerged in the 90s. Do not fall in the trap again!
Things Developers Should Do For Web Accessibility
It's really common to hear that someone from the UK is "going to Europe". Takes some time to get used to it.
I think your quote sums up the intention of this article and most of the "don't do this" posts.

What they all are getting at I think is that constructs in a language can be "abused" or used less than effectively either in terms of processing efficiency or user/programmer interaction.

So when they say "don't do this" it's more to show cases where doing whatever "this" is can be bad. Not that it's always bad and should never be used.

Also, the "don't do this" mentality can be a useful exercise to teach yourself alternative ways of getting things done.
On #3, I thought the general consensus among economists was for capital gains as having a substantial embodied inflation component. Thus, making a $100k investment now, waiting 20 years, and selling it for $150k isn't really a gain at all under most historical inflation rates, and thus taxing the $50k as current income at the end is kind of unfair, and worse, would deter some capital investment (at least, would shift from long term to short term).

The argument for favorable taxation of dividends is less direct -- that they're roughly equivalent to capital gains returned through repurchase or retained as cash, and that there's an efficiency argument for returning that money to shareholders. If dividends are taxed higher than capital gains, there's a strong tax incentive to do stock buybacks or retain earnings instead.
Try cmd+f. The attribution, however oblique, was there...so I skipped the phrase "plagiarised his argument from". This is the relevant text from PK, in case you are curious:

"First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base."[1]

Which of course, if it isn't obvious, is, literally+legally false and figuratively BS.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-und...
Any pointers ?

The only way I can think would be a rather convoluted conversion to dataframe process, which would be a pain to convert back.
Following guides on how to answer interview questions does more harm than good.

Just be honest and be yourself.
For those who have never used a functional programming language, those often allow you to do "if-less" or at the very least "if-lite" programming via pattern matching.
Looking to rent a bullet for that Leh Ladakh trip perhaps? Try Rideindia
Today’s Full Moon is the 13th and Last of 2012
"As a front-end developer and modern first-world citizen" -> This sounded douchey.
The Visual 6502 JavaScript Simulator
Replacing a switch statement or large if statement with a virtual call (enum -> interface refactoring) can definitely be very beneficial. It can turn [crimes against humanity](https://github.com/aidanf/Brilltag/blob/master/Tagger_Code/f...) into perfectly respectable code.

But, obviously, don't take this too far. If you find yourself not using an if statement (or ternary operator) when writing the absolute value (for non-optimization reasons)... you've gone too far.

int UnclearAbs(int value) {
return value * (value >> 31);
}
easiest way to get motorcycle on rent for your next bike trip.
"Why was the US so successful after WW2, particularly compared to the decade before it" is a really complex question with many confounding factors in the analysis.

I strongly suspect "everywhere else previously industrialized in the world had been largely destroyed" had a lot to do with it.
Some of this seems petty. For example, the author gives the following "bad" example:

def method (object)
if object.property
param = object.property
else
param = default_param
end
end

And suggests that this is better:

def method (object)
param = object.property || default_param
end

To me, this is an example of an if statement by another name. Sure, you cut out a few lines, but it's still an if-then construct. Both examples are most likely going to be treated the same way by the compiler as well.
I think this is (once again) just a question of finding the right balance. Using polymorphism to avoid manual conditionals is a practice that can often improve readability and maintainability. One just shouldn't drive it too far.

I do agree that people are massively overusing inheritance. In particular its often used as a means for code reuse, not for polymorphism. In most cases composition should be favored over inheritance.
> they're not repackaging the google SDK, which is nice to see

They are actually not allowed to do so anymore, as of about a month and a half ago; Google decided they didn't want to be quite so open going forward.

> Section 3.4 of Google's new terms, which were updated Tuesday, reads, "You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK."

-- http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57550824-93/google-modifies...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4793068
Talk has been posted here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5OQz0Ko8c
Hmm Allwinner A1X and Exynos 4412 both have integrated Mali 400 GPUs, so there should be at least some GPU support on Linux [1].

There is an unofficial XBMC port for A1X devices which supports the HW Video Decoder of the SOC [2]. I have an A10 device at work, but unfortunately won't be in the office to play around with it for some time.

[1] http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400

[2] http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC
Fine, but the point is that the guy is only half-way through his reflexion. OO programming is an effective way to organize the business logic. And that logic should be coded in a sequential fashion to be readable and maintainable. Finding the right balance would be a much more interesting subject than to say 'ifs suck'
The thing with pattern matching is that it is as safe as the OO approach, in the sense that the compiler will warn you if you don't match all the cases and that forcing you to use an explicit ADT protects against boolean blindness (for example, writing code that assumes you are in case 2 if you are not in case 1)

That said, when it comes to extensibility, pattern matching is more similar to if statements then the OO - its easy to write new functions but hard to extend the original ADT with new cases. If being able to add new functions is important it might be better to use if statements then to do a major rewrite to use OO instead. (You could always use a visitor pattern if you want the extra compiler safety but that can get very complicated, IMO)
Apparently it was EOLed.
I think it makes perfect sense. You have a pan-european state that deals with the big stuff (like human rights) and national ethnic groups for the little stuff.

There has been a trend towards large countries breaking up into national/ethnic groupings for almost 200 years in Europe. The phrase "Balkanization" dates, not from the recent Yugoslav wars, but initially from 200 years ago when the Ottoman's were breaking up!
I agree, and I prefer the first one, it just seems clearer for me.
> you have not achieved much in life

There are over 6 billion people on this planet. How many have you heard of by name?

Of those you have heard of, how many appear to have happy lives and don't have children who wont talk to them or belong on a MTV reality show?

I would say live well and if after you die you are remembered outside of your friends and family then you most likely did something wrong.
The truth about SEO
EU is a failing Project that has chosen to ignore democratic procedures and no-votes for decades. It doesn't work, it never did and it never will. It's basic economics that you can't have the same central bank for two countries like Germany and Greece, isn't it? But not when integration unelected fanatics like ex-marxist Barroso come into play. They don't care about nuances like democratic NOs or economic commonse sense. They want to build this - as you called it - superpower - at all costs and against the people. And people are tired of this nonsense.

It may look fine when you sit in Eastern Europe and get all the funds. But think for German taxpayer for a while who now has to pay for your infrastruture, meet your debt obligations in case something goes wrong, and import all the unemployed form your country. How much longer do you think Germans will take it? Of course, it's nice to be on the receiving end. But being in an economic crisis + having your own unemployed + tax hikes for your highways, do you think this makes EU popular among German voters? No, it doesn't. If Germany was given a chance there is a good chance they would opt to exit as well.

Eastern Europe is very pro-EU because it is bribed by all the money stolen from the Western Europe. But nobody, really nobody, in the West wants to stay on the board of the Titanic anymore.
A nice blog series on if-less programming (in Portuguese): http://alquerubim.blogspot.com/search/label/ifless
New Year Tech To-Do List
Tell me what important country is not having problems.

I am from Brazil, we are going full double dip here ( ie: in 2009 the government went batshit crazy in allowing credit, and then we has 7% growth rate, thus year we had several months of negative growth, and banks complaining of a huge rise in defaults )
The AV server had been replaced after there were problems with it on the previous Vancouver-Sydney flight (the cabin crew told me this) but it looked like the DHCP server had not been updated with the new MAC address (or the replacement server hadn't been programmed to use the same MAC address as the one it replaced).

I considered sending DHCP responses to the server myself, but decided that injecting traffic would be too risky during flight... especially since I was flying back from a conference where one of the speakers had been talking about inadequate firewalling between IFE systems and aeronautical control systems.
Replacing static decisions with polymorphism is indeed often a good idea, but there's nothing wrong with using if when it's appropriate.
This is a terrible example of IF-less programming. The conditional is still here, it is just implied.

IF:

def method (object)
if object.property
param = object.property
else
param = default_param
end
end

Claimed to be IF-less:

def method (object)
param = object.property || default_param
end

It may be easier to read, but in the end you are still writing an IF statement.
This trollish comment is uncalled for. Tata is a huge conglomerate; and they indeed have quite a few interesting things going on in various domains. Few examples that I can think of: www.crlindia.com and www.tataadvancedsystems.com.
Those who use if are obviously too flimsy to decide what their programs should do. I would not trust such persons to write any code at all.
Climate change is big business (for the insurance industry)
Arithmetic Series: Polya's Induction and Analogy in Mathematics
Maybe your outside validation so far has come from people that don't really "get it"?

People on the outside may be easily impressed (parents, friends, acquaintances) but maybe you don't quite believe it because they haven't poked holes in your accomplishments so far?

Yes, I am projecting.
TCS (Tata's IT arm) has a revenue of $10 billion and employs 260000 people. How can that amount to nothing? TCS builds software for a large number of Fortune 500 companies. You would be surprised how much of software you use daily is built in India.
This is the latest update it seems http://boundarydevices.com/i-mx6-ethernet/ but that is decent for a consumer type ARM device (I presume some of the server options do better).
I had a look at your todo-app. I did not get 100% of what you are doing but your project looks ambitious ( which I think is good! )to say the least.

One of the problems with ambitious projects is that getting adoption is kind of hard because people's inertia is directly proportional to the amount of change. I suggest you come up with compelling reasons to switch to this framework ( maybe better IDE support since type's is such a big part of your framework? ). I guess a video with a famous IDE providing code-completion seamlessly with your framework would work very well. Or how about rewriting your framework in typescript? Then your's will be the first Typescript framework and hence adoption will be easier.
I disagree. Sure, the code is functionally equivalent today, but the next person touching the 'or' version might be less likely to introduce side-effecting computation. The 'if-else' version is completely open-ended.

We need to think about the effect our choices have on the next person who touches the code. Often with a different baseline people make different changes. It's a micro-form of 'No Broken Windows'.
Feedspot.com anyone? New startup in the town. Looks promising.

Try it out http://feedspot.com
Wow, I read about HavenCo in my high school economics textbook. Kind of surreal to see you here now. Best of luck on your new venture!
Ask HN: Online Account Security Questions
I'm constantly bothered by the techniques used to secure our online accounts.

First - the multiple security questions.
Second - the mandatory length and confusion in our passwords

This techniques are ridiculous and only hinders usability and adoption.

How about letting users enter a pin instead of requiring them to answer and set 5 random questions.

Password security, if I want it to be password - so be it. Give me a warning and let me keep moving. That ALONE has been the reasons I opt for not using certain services online.

Why must online security be stricter than real world application such as ATM pin with the added benefit of using all alphanumeric chars?

While taking brute force precaution in the code - why make it harder for users to use/register for your service?
The first example is an actual example of how removing ifs can reduce complexity, but the last few seem misguided. It is no easier to test `collection.each {|item| result << item if item.condition? }` than `collections.select(&:condition)`; they are all but equivalent. The exception handling example doesn't actually show the benefit of not using ifs, it shows the benefits of using exceptions over return values. Setting up default values via || is also a nice trick, but it hardly makes a macro difference.

Also, "# I slept during functional classes"? I don't know ruby, but the `each` method seems to be just a variant of map, which is a pretty fundamental functional construct.