skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can printline for debugging using the trace function in Haskell. Or use unsafePerformIO, which is usually outlawed for production code but just fine in a transient state for debugging.

On "writing code shouldn't be easy", you're right that this statement, out of context, seems ridiculous. What I mean is that, when there are trade-offs between making it easy to write vs. read code, generally the reader's interests should be favored, because legible code is so rare. Obviously it's better for it to be easy to write code and to read it, but ease-of-writing is a secondary priority for large, production systems.
GNU sed 4.2.2 released, maintainer resigns
3D PRINTED CHRISTMAS COOKIES
The airspace around the President is heavily regulated, wherever (s)he goes. A drone big enough to be a threat would be noticed in an otherwise empty sky.
Google Finds Its Design Voice On iOS
I've used every GoPro camera made, minus the first film camera they started with. I love them, but I also tend to hate them at times too. I've had to RMA about three of them, and my friends have had issues too. Hopefully they can put their massive popularity and growth (money) back into the product to make it more stable and robust. They've really created an awesome product when it works well. I know that if someone came up with a product that worked flawlessly every time, they could chip away at GoPro's market share.
Obviously as unpaid volunteers they're not obligated on any level to be polite, neutral, and professional. But that's not the whole point.

There are two ways to deviate from a neutral, professional presentation. You can be snarky, mean, or just plain evil (negative), or you can be silly, colorful, and nice (positive). Each of them breeds more emotions of the same kind - excepting those who would wish for a professional presentation, regardless. I want to live in a world where everyone would wish only to breed positive emotions, or none at all.
Producers of Minecraft Documentary upload their new movie to The Pirate Bay
I'm not spinning, and no ARM's size isn't an advantage (I didn't say it was).

Intel wants to build everything in volume. Intel's current business model does not benefit from specialization or customization. Intel needs to make a large profit on each CPU sold. Intel drove out of the market anyone who could build a chipset since it interfered with volume and profits. Intel would be happiest with their current business model if they built one laptop motherboard, one server motherboard, and one desktop motherboard.

This is a strategy built for the PC market. It does not have anything to do with the current mobile market (non-laptop).

Samsung and Apple want to build the best end product. They want to put things in and leave things out. They cannot do that with Intel, but can do that with ARM. Intel doesn't allow or want customized SoC. Apple and Samsung do. Other vendors also make their own SoC from ARM cores. These SoCs provide different benefits. Having a common instruction set allows switching to another SoC when needed.
Besides that literalists/fundamentalists do not comprise the majority of Protestants either.
Are you saying $10/mo is too much for how much you use Dropbox? Or that you would feel better if they gave you less space...
Drone operators work with less intel than boots on the ground, and have less ability to precisely target, so it's pretty much a given that there will be more civilian casualties, not less.

If drones didn't make it easier to kill, they wouldn't be used on such a massive scale (the US military now trains more drone operators than fighter pilots).
Didn't really think of that, but you are right.

I was saying Intel doesn't want any customization because it needs volume and price to maintain profits. Customization subtracts from volume. They have PC mentality not a Mobile mentality. Power consumption isn't the problem, but business model is.
Before we adorn our tinfoil hats and assume that the first thing the Facebook "Biz Dev" guys look at in the morning is their API stats, maybe this is an exercise in "Empowering" internal employees to work on side projects not directly associated with their core product.
It also lends for a great headline about their dev culture which in turn attracts more dev talent.
Is this sarcasm?

I don't use a ton of software to keep myself productive, but Dropbox is easily one of the most valuable out of those I use.

Apple, with its considerable engineering talent and resources, still can't even see Dropbox from where they stand right now with iCloud.
It will be interesting to see if 2 Player Productions attempt to dialogue with those who would normally steal their work will succeed in actually converting many into customers.
I think that the general fear is that war will turn into a 'video game' played by a bunch of people in a secure warehouse in middle America. This will remove the human aspect of what is going on at the other end of the controls, and we'll be less likely to get 'soldiers' doing things like questioning orders.
I'm not a fan of the format for gruntfiles (which is not to say I think it's objectively bad, just that it doesn't appeal to me personally). I much prefer using Jake as the build tool for my JS projects:

https://github.com/mde/jake
“It seems odd that at the beginning of the Internet everyone decided everything should stick around forever,”

No. It doesn't.

That's how it goes. The split-second something transits on the Internet there are countless copies on servers, caches, proxies, etc. In addition to that TFA mentioned the loophole that, well, once something can be seen it can be recorded using lots and lots of endless external means.

Oh, and that "everything sticks around forever" is not just for stuff on the Internet: it's much worse than that.

It's that "anything that is on any device connected to the Internet" can potentially stick around forever.

Ask Scarlett Johannson how it worked for her private pic in her smartphone...

People saying that "our pics are never saved anywhere" are using deception to lure clueless people in.
are you proposing propetual motion? if you have the energy to lift the mass, you have the energy to power the light directly and bypass the losses of setting up the dravity weight again.
The criticism of drones isn't of the technology, but the attitude of those operating them. The article mentions that it doesn't put the operator's own people at risk, and is trying to point out that this creates a detachment from the consequences. Before, taking out a target required people on the ground in some capacity, actually carrying out the mission or just identifying the target. Drones undoubtably save the lives of troops on a per-engagement basis, but now that there isn't that risk, and without some process or oversight, it's becoming too easy to just pull the trigger and destroy some pixels on a screen.
>it's reasonable to use a method which tries to minimize 'friendly' casualties first and e'enemy' collateral damage second

That is a very broad statement. Would it apply to enemies using Chemical, Biological or Nuclear weapons?

> people (soldiers) were dying by the dozen daily

I don't think that you intend to, but it seems like you are counting only friendly casualties as people casualties.

> asymmetrical and unfair to a technological backward foe

Which would probably be all foes but one, if popular media is to be trusted with statistics. There is no country that spends asuch as US and that has been the case for a long long time I believe. So all foes are backward and hence a war, if the technology is the criteria of fairness, is going to be extremely unfair to them.
As we all argue over whether this is powered by gravity, or food, or nuclear fusion, somewhere in a dark hut someone is lifting a weight to attend to the baby that just woke up in the middle of the night.
Ada was the first language I ran into that would make guesses about your code (e.g. type of variable) and that scared me greatly. It was also fun to see the Ada compiler generate better code than the C compiler.
Really? Can Netflix afford to be picky with content owners? It seems their main problem is the limited size of their online catalog...? They should take anything they can get!

Let me put it to you this way: If it ain't on Netflix, I ain't watching it. Now, I don't consider myself typical; usually I'm willing to do research, dig into things, I know multiple ways to "access" content, etc, etc. But at the end of the day, I'm tired (and lazy), and when it comes down to it, I'm browsing Netflix, which is full of stuff, so I almost never notice if something is missing. In this respect, I'm willing to bet I'm typical.

Content owners: either get on the bandwagon (and that means distributing to everyone, not just Netflix, who doesn't require exclusive deals, I might add), and make your stuff available easily, else you will be left behind and rightfully forgotten.

I do also have Amazon Prime, but that has enough crossover with Netflix that I mostly use the shipping benefits. If I'm looking for something, I will check CanIStream.it (aka, Don'tMakeMeFuckingPirate.It), and if it's not available on Netflix/Amazon, I'll wait. Sooner or later it will be.
How can you possibly have tests without well-documented semantics? You may have code that you call "tests" and it may print some reassuring messages, but you can't actually test anything without a specification of what the correct behavior is.
If you are as confused by OPs talking about 800lb gorillas and soforth as I was:

Snapchat is a picture sharing application that uses facebook's API.

Poke is a competitor that facebook made.

OP is implying that facebook saw Snapchat's beginning success by seeing how many API calls they were making and then copied snapchat, instead of buying them.

Thus: OP is implying that Facebook uses its API to see up-and-comers in the social space, and then copies them.

(Trojan Horse was very confusing here. Typcially "Trojan Horse", used in this case, would mean that facebook was actually controlling snapchat interactions beyond what snapchat intended.)

Personally I don't think that this is a very unique idea, and calling facebook's API a "trojan horse" over it is absurd.

Buying out a company isn't done for honor, it's done for value. Facebook doesn't buy you because it's the "right" thing to do because you "beat them to it" with an idea. They do it because it's easier for them to do so than to build a copy. Maybe this means they're buying some IP, or a community, or some talent or something, but it has nothing to do with "because it's the right thing to do".

---

Snapchat: http://www.snapchat.com/#

Poke: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/facebook-poke/id588594730?mt...
My karma is pretty simple to understand: I don't irc, game, or blog (and used to blog a lot), and I tend to own the tops of security threads. Now that I have name recognition, you can safely assume anything I write here "unfairly" receives 2x-3x as many upvotes as it should. Except on security threads, where HN tends to be full of crazy people.

But to the point at hand: I can easily make a case for my HN comments being more lucrative than any book I could have written. Easily. There is no way a book would have been as valuable as recruiting vector, for instance; I've hired more people from HN than any other source.
What still amazes me is that people (around the world) are willing to let these US companies store their personal data, email, etc. I'm not trying to be a troll but I think it's worth pointing out that many non-US citizens would have a BIG problem with this. Or so I thought. The other thing that surprises me is that so many techies use these services, where most of the functionality can be easily achieved using existing tools, which would be under your personal control. If its a choice between giving up freedom and having the responsibility to backup my own data, I choose the latter. Sure my grandma may choose the former but I would try to convince her otherwise.
Set image to LLena, params to 10 / 0.5 and see her winking you with her left eye in a weird way ;)
On things to fix:

While I appreciate the use of history, I promise you I don't need to hold my position on the page for every single letter I type in the search box: http://screencast.com/t/1qFwxlz5

I ended up with a history entry for "search results for 'c'", "search results for 'co'", "search results for 'cog'", etc.

Maybe trim this down to only firing after 10s on inactivity in a text input or use onblur? I'm not too sure what the answer is but it (page history) definitely loses any usefulness when architected in this manner.
> while(s++ = t++);

is absolutely trivial to understand if the reader has taken the time to actually learn the language in which the code is written. Saying this is "hard to understand" is like saying that "Ich liebe dich" is hard to understand. I'm sure it might be if the reader has never encountered German, but that's not real complexity, and it's not unreasonable for someone writing in German to assume that her reader has some competency with the language.
This is a tad annoying when writing comments with indented code blocks, since it pops up with every `@` you write, which in Coffeescript or Ruby can happen frequently. Great, otherwise.
Oh, I have heard about them. But there aren't that many people who are interested in blowing themselves up, and it is all but impossible to get any of them near the president (or any other highvalue target, but the president is probably the most difficult target that people actually want to get) - drones? Not so much.
Yeah, no problem.

1) That's just the way CloudApp handles zipped files.

2) That's because I didn't include the fonts that I used. Wouldn't have been appropriate to distribute them.
Why Words Are So Important
Honestly, I think the current incarnation of social crap is going to be pretty short-lived. If you really look at it, very little is actually any good at what it does. It's just barely good enough. Google Hangouts is probably the only significant innovation in the past few years.

I'd be very interested in a startup promising genuine innovation, connecting people in new ways and changing the way we can socialize, something that everyone of a certain demographic would want to use. That's basically what Facebook was early on.

But building in line with the current "social" paradigm? Not very interesting.
They don't reduce "enemy collateral damage", though. In fact, the collateral fatalities from drone attacks are one of the highest at 98%, according to some estimates [1]. Compare this to estimated civillian casualty rate of 60% in WWII [2] and around 50% in Vietnam [3] (distorted figures because anyone in a "free-fire" zone is considered the enemy).

The intelligence for drone strikes are based on patterns, such as a party of men carrying guns or a group of unknown people plotting something. And so these strikes routinely -- and sometimes deliberately -- target wedding parties [4], funerals, and rescue workers [5], and children [6].

Add to this the psychological trauma of constantly living under the threat of drones [7], it is no wonder citizens of countries where these programs are carried out hold somewhat of a grudge against the US [8]. You can call it signature strike, or whatever you want, the fact is that bombs do not know the difference between combatants and women/children/civilians. They kill indiscriminately. So forgive me if I don't see the "advantage" of using drones over boots on the ground or see how they are "better".

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/05/opinion/bergen-obama-drone/ind...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

[3] http://www.vn-agentorange.org/edmaterials/cost_of_vn_war.htm...

[4] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57448041/afghanistan-off...

[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drone...

[6] http://tribune.com.pk/story/229844/the-day-69-children-died/

[7] http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Stan...

[8] http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/27/pakistani-public-opinion...
Show hn: Data tracking app for grower enthusiasts
Another problem is that we, in other countries, don't think of America as the pinnacle of democracy or progress, don't think your causes as just, nor we believe you have any moral or other right to play global cop or to have access to cheap oil.

And yet, a large part of the US public and lots of its leaders, thinks those things about the US, and gives its blessing to foreign intervention.

Add to that that we also (what a shocker) value our lives and our cultures, and don't consider ourselves inferior barbarians to be "civilised" or "invaded", and you can understand our problem with drones.

In fact, some of us, view the US as the barbarians, burning villages 15.000 away from their country or throwing chemicals that kill and harm hundreds of thousands of people (Agent Orange), throwing nuclear bombs at civilians, doing medical tests on unsuspecting people ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment ), invading sovereign countries with BS pretexts, keeping at "beyond law" prison, pushing for mass surveillance, ACTA and such. Heck, you even have segregated buses until 50 years ago. Even today, 70% of the prison population is non whites, while at the same time you have the highest incarceration rate on earth ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat... ). Heck, you guys still have the death penalty!

A country like that PLUS drones? The stuff that nightmares are made of...
Honestly, I had no idea that they had a film camera. Thanks!
i'm also in the process of creating a personal portfolio site. so far i got: http://muellerwolfram.prtfl.io/about

also, i think that creating a personal website is such a common use case that as a side project, i'm creating a saas webapp for creating portflio sites. checkout http://prtfl.io in coming weeks.
Yeah Flash has its uses for sure. But it's best not to design portfolio websites with it, etc.
When I started in my CS program years ago, Ada was the teaching language (now I believe they moved to Java like everyone else). At the time I remember joining in the grumbling "Why do we have to learn Ada?! Who the hell uses Ada?" ...but now, looking back, it was a pretty good teaching language: You don't have to worry about little details like C, OOP, decent complier tools, etc.

I have 5 or 6 Ada textbooks still sitting on my shelf, which are now even further outdated. Maybe I'll go get the latest GNAT and play with Ada again to pretend I still use those books.
"tiny computer programs called cookies"

I had a good laugh at the article until I realized this wasn't supposed to be a joke. This is a serious article right?
Can you tell us how much of the FB API SnapChat was using and if there's a "safe" way to take advantage of FB Graph and other features without leaking too much detail to FB?
Ada is a really nice, really effective language for being careful in, and yet compiling low-level and with a great deal of on-the-metal control, possibly more so than C without cheating and stepping outside the language. And yet, inexplicably, it never became popular. It can't be compiler support, there's GNAT and there has been for over a decade.
Spoon: Run any application on demand
I don't know exactly how they model shuffling, but I know that some players dislike truly random hands, which is why it's considered improper and impolite to do more than 4 shuffles.

This may actually be somewhat of a myth. I haven't verified it myself. I do know that Bridge protocol is 4 riffle shuffles, and typical riffle shuffles don't have enough entropy for 4 of them to randomize the deck (52! ~ 2^225.6, so you'd need 56.4 bits for each, and riffle shuffles have about 30 bits) but I find it hard to envision why this (possibly slight) lack of randomness would manifest itself in higher frequencies of good hands.
Well, it works both ways. When the US can fight a war with few or no casualties, it gets harder to fight a war of attrition against it - which was explicitly part of Al-Qaida's strategy, and not by coincidence, this was the strategy leveraged against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Also, I think this point in time is similar to the period when the US had the nuclear bomb until the Soviets and others had it too. Right now it gives the US an edge that's disconcerting, but on a longer horizon, every military will have these capabilities.
> with out the personal touch

Care to elaborate?
Even weirder http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/04/decision-to-entangle-...
Weak,Soft and Phantom References - When & When Not To Use
In the case of the Economist, you can absolutely assume that the pun was intended.
> "Psychosis" is a real word with real meaning. It's frustrating when people use it as a slang word because that use stigmatises people with mental health problems.

The media make a habit of hyperbolically using words to the point that their original meaning is destroyed - see "mayhem" for a good example.
Isn't that already how war has been fought for most of the last century? The people making major decisions are rarely on the front line.
I was watching Good Will Hunting last night. I didn't realize this guy was real.
Yeah, and it is clearly a fucking idiotic design. Breaking a basic navigation feature that works as intended in every other application and web page for the sake of "design" is not a good thing.
I think if you talk to a lot of developers they would like to be at a "level 4" as you call it but the pressures and deadlines on them don't allow for that as often as they'd like. Of course it's in the best long-term interest, but management are not doing this type of long term thinking.

I think it's easy to judge from academia where you do an assignment, then move on to the next. But it only takes a couple of years in a real-world environment for code to get incredibly f'd up even if the developers were trying to be diligent. People come and go, platforms go out of style, programming fads come and go and, of course, one or two mediocre people on the team add their code to the mix.
For all those advocating Ada on this thread, could you recommend a good tutorial to us? I love learning about new programming languages, but particularly for a relatively-obscure language like Ada, I would appreciate a recommendation.
Well for Google Drive you pay almost $30 annually for extra 25GB space. $10 per year for 20GB if you use SkyDrive. Plus both Google Drive and SkyDrive support online doc editing. So yes it is really too much for paying $10/month for 100GB space which I may not use fully for foreseeable future.
1. We don't yet know whether or not Facebook's Poke app will be successful.

2. Snapchat has been popular for a while ... why did they just start copying now?

3. Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a desire to build in what they perceive to be as replaceable features since day 1 of the platform. SuperWall, SuperPoke, Free Gifts, and many more were eventually integrated or blocked. They've tried to replicate Quora (the questions failed), FriendFeed (they copied the "like" and the real-time feed before acquiring them), Instagram (their separate photos app), and more.

--

I think the key risk here is operating in a space that can be easily replicated by the 800lb gorilla. The API is not a trojan horse. It's the platform that enables many of the viral apps to grow. Yes, there's no doubt they get intelligence from their data, but that's not the sole purpose of the API and suggesting so is ludicrous (there are plenty of other sources for data, including the Apple app store).

There are also are plenty of examples where Facebook simply could not replicate some of the other companies' success despite a similar feature set. Blake Ross claims they made the new Poke app in "12 days". (He also was responsible for the failed Questions app).

It's a statement that they believe SnapChat is a feature. That's not yet proven and we'll have to see how this plays out. This is step 1 (test whether or not SnapChat is simply a feature). Step 2 is to become more aggressive with acquisition offers should the Poke app fail AND should SnapChat continue to experience massive growth.