skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"automatically makes you think that it is an intentional act by the event organizers to discriminate against women/minorities..."

Whoa, nellie!

That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak.

I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world.

Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride.

Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends.

OI have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.

So I raise my hand and ask, "Could this process be improved?" No accusation of deliberate malice or even incompetence, just asking how we can do this better.
> ... also, have you considered pointer arithmetic?

Good point. Tried it and makes no difference. Looking at the assembly, it appears that the difference in performance lies in the prolog code for the loop rather than in the loop itself.
Shrug, i didn't downvote the OP, just provided insight (as requested) into why the post has been downvoted.

The tone doesnt have to be flowery and sweet. But the tone should never sound like a personal attack. "Do you seriously not see" implys that the person being replied to is too stupid, or at least incompetent, to see what has been pointed out.
This site[1] has a couple games emulated in javascript. Just select Mega Man from the list and start playing.

[1] http://fir.sh/projects/jsnes/
> how many people would settle for simply being rich?

Forget being rich, I'm willing to settle for financial security for my family.
A year without caffeine
Open the SVG file in Illustrator. Works great
I've observed the scientific community to be generally curmudgeonly about software issues overall, so I'd predict that they will be the last group to move to Python 3. So once every other community has moved over (in this order: hobbyists, bleeding-edge startups, tech companies/startups in general, corporate environments), then it will be their turn, and they certainly will because the ecosystem will have completed moving over.

As far as 2to3/3to2, that entire process in my opinion will be going away; once you've pegged Python 2.6 as your bottom version, it's straightforward (though not without effort) to produce a codebase that runs in Python 2 and 3 without any changes. I've already done this for my template language Mako, where version 0.7.4 has been enhanced to support Python 2.4 all the way through the latest 3.3 without any 2to3/3to2 step.
Nice! Flash man here :)
Agreed. The caller should be responsible for checking whether req is null. As for getHeaders, why can it return null? When does a request have null headers?
Power law and the pareto principle are definitely very related, but I think one is an instance of the other. I'd argue that power law is one manifestation under the umbrella of pareto principle, as compared to a stepwise function where 80% of actions/people/whatever act one way, and then another class of 20% act dramatically different from the 80% but similar to each other.

VC fund returns aren't driven by 80/20 (although they may fit that description), but by the much smaller number of outliers.
Speed up your code foo  Learn some Java multithreading
> I'd already set up all the 301 redirects on the .co.uk domain and I had to piggy back on a server I ran for other clients.

I can cut my server costs to zero as well, if I just hide all of my personal domains on one of our work servers.

Anyway, couldn't he just as easily have used Tumblr, or stuck with WordPress?
The most valuable piece of code I ever wrote
Thanks for the suggestions, just ordered a copy of Internet Core Protocols.

Are you familiar with either Expert Python Programming or Effective C++? Would you suggest Python Essential Reference and/or Modern C++ Design over either of those for undergrads preparing for interviews in those languages?
Show HN: Scan and share apps on your iPhone's home screen
see also: http://thenounproject.com/
A funny thing about that notion.

Blackberry OS, Ubuntu and Samsung Tizen all treat web apps as first class citizens providing JavaScript APIs to access native functions.

(Chrome OS, WebOS, Firefox OS, and Windows 8 also do this and I think Windows Phone 8 does too)
What about modern diets? Surely our ancestors didn't eat as much sugar as we do. Perhaps a better diet is more important than flossing?

Disclosure: I floss.
That may be because they are big. (YC may not be big in terms of money invested, but they are in terms of number of startups.)

It may also be because they somehow help those startups succeed. Thus, they don't pick winners, they make winners.

Another possibility is that successful startup founders self select themselver into those founds.
This is a great story and inspiring and hits all the right "feel good" buttons.

BUT.

Isn't the story really "how blind people use the accessibility features of iOS"? Accessibility, specifically Voice Over, is a core component of iOS and pretty straightforward for developers to implement. The new Flickr app, for instance, seems to offer many of the same accessibility features shown in the video, though their implementation could use a little work. The Instagram guys should be commended for adding the accessibility hooks but, really, that's all they did. That's a day's worth of work.

Can anyone speak to how Instagram works for the blind on an Android device?
"You're assuming that because there isn't "diversity" the organizers must be racist or biased"

Whoa, nellie!

That isn't the argument, not by a long shot. Let's take race out of this. I organize a tech conference. All the speakers are cyclists. Why? Because I asked everyone I knew personally to speak.

I am not prejudiced against non-cyclists, it just so happens that because I cycle, I know a lot of cyclists socially. There is no malicious intent, but the result is not representative of the world we live in, just of a small pocket of the world.

Furthermore, I have absolutely and positively overlooked speakers like Sandi Metz who are cyclists, but don't ride in Ontario, or Pete Forde, who lives in Toronto but doesn't ride.
Whereas, if I sat down with the plan from the start to canvas the best speakers available, I would have cast a wider net than just my personal friends.

I have no idea what process those organizers used, but judging by the result, it did not include reaching out to a large number of qualified speakers.
One explanation is that this application wakes up every second which keeps the CPU and GPU from sleeping or lowering frequency, which would reduce the delay introduced by whatever CPU/GPU governors are being used.
The difference is that you can distinguish at the type level between values that could be "null" (Optionals) and values that are never null, and the two look different from each other. Otherwise you tend to have one of two problems:

a) Every function checks all its parameters for null, and you do null checks before calling a method on any object, wasting time.

b) It's down to the programmer to figure out where a null check is necessary and where it isn't, and they sometimes get it wrong.

(Of course, better code will avoid calling isDefined or get, but even if you just use it as a like-for-like replacement, using optionals in place of null can improve your program)
Apple Maps uses Acxiom, Factual, Localeze, and TomTom for small business listing. They have APIs and you can start querying their resources to build a database out for your local area.
I agree with the point of you are making, but feel the need to question your use of the term 'wonder drug' when describing accutane, also known as isotretinoin. HN readers should know that isotretinoin is a profoundly dangerous chemotherapy drug which was only by coincidence discovered to cure acne. The side effects of isotretinoin can be permanent [1] to the extent that the drug's inventor Hoffman-La Roche stopped selling it in 2009 because it was losing so many lawsuits. Yet the FDA (and all the rest) refuses to withdraw this drug from market. It is a modern pharmaceutical scandal which is still in progress.

If a woman becomes pregnant while taking isotretinoin, her children WILL have birth defects. The drug also causes depression in far more cases than Roche's data suggest. The side effects are as diverse as they are serious – there exist entire forums dedicated to sufferers of this drug's permanent adverse effects.

This drug cures acne like nothing else we know. However, the same poorly understood mechanism that enables it to dry out one's skin also systematically dries one's joints of the hyaluronic acid that is so necessary for their lubrication. Since ceasing my treatment four months ago after researching causes for the cartilage damage in my right kneecap, I have been transformed from a healthy and sport-playing science undergraduate to finding even typing this message uncomfortable because of pains in my fingers. So much that I have taken for granted as a 21 year old has been taken away from me by this drug, and I'm not alone in this. I don't like to overdramatise things, and my situation should improve to some extent given time, but taking this drug is the worst decision I have ever made, and the young, impressionable people who are all-too-readily prescribed this drug must be made more aware of its risks.

Remarkably effective acne cure, yes. Wonderdrug, absolutely not. Calling it one is just disrespectful to those who have killed themselves [2] and whose lives it has damaged [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotretinoin#Permanent_side_eff...

[2] http://rense.com/general32/scu.htm

[3] http://jacquelinefox.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/ibs-sufferers-...
Reading to the bottom and then viewing the subsequent post makes it pretty clear they are not doing it in Java; hence the need to change the title.
Heh. We've owned izik.com for more than 2 years now, and we almost launched with that name instead of blekko.
Unfortunately Hipchat won't work for my day job because the higher ups have this thing against hosted services (and given the security climate nowadays I can't entirely blame them).

Any idea of something like Hipchat but hostable internally?
Apache Ant Recipes for Web Developers (free)
This book is a collection of Apache Ant recipes gathered up over the years while performing Web development tasks ... which provided a good experiment in self publishing.

its free to download and share
I heard each of these themes in my head as I read them here.
CoachUp | Boston, MA

https://www.coachup.com/

CoachUp is a marketplace that helps athletes achieve their full potential by connecting them with great private coaches. We are the nation's leading private coaching provider with over 7,000 private coaches in every sport, all across America.

We're looking for talented individuals who want to be part of a small team going after a huge opportunity. Specifically, we have positions open for Senior Software Engineers and Lead UI/UX Designers. We're building in Ruby on Rails, developing at a fast pace, and are constantly iterating and pushing releases into production. There will never be a single boring day at CoachUp! If you would like to find out more information, you can visit:
www.coachup.com/careers

We're fortunate enough to have just closed our first round of VC financing, and are looking to invest heavily in our product:

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/01/02/gabe-kapler-c...

We offer competitive salaries, full health and dental coverage, a fun work atmosphere, and flexible hours. If you're looking to have a large impact on a small company that is changing the world, get in touch with us today by sending your resume to careers[at]coachup.com
Looking at the patch, they just modified rngd to populate /dev/random from /dev/urandom instead of /dev/hwrng.

/dev/urandom in turn just uses the kernel's internal entropy pool, which is the same one /dev/random uses, and a PRNG to stretch the entropy when the raw entropy available is depleted.

My fear here is that the kernel's internal entropy pool is just constantly being replaced by the PRNG output from /dev/urandom, which is then being used by /dev/urandom to reseed it's PRNG output, causing essentially just a cascade of a PRNG reseeding itself. In turn, /dev/urandom's PRNG was seeded by some initial entropy condition that may have been less than optimal, especially if it was just whatever default was there soon after boot time.

If /dev/hwrng was designed to be a primary, or worse the, source of good entropy, then this patch may have eliminated good entropy.

Anyone with kernel-level knowledge of the Linux entropy pool care to weigh in? I don't know as much as I wish I did.
Some of them will never stop using Fortran, ever, until they die. My old boss was trained with Fortran, and made a moderately successful career in particle physics never needing to learn new tools. The ideas he needed expressed were short, he was good at explaining them, and it was never too big an effort to turn them into something that could run in PAW, ROOT, Python, VHDL, whatever was needed. He did the thinking, and expressed it in the language he knew best. He had postdocs, graduate students, and sometimes undergrads to do the leg work. Would he have had a better career if he'd spent time learning new languages rather than thinking about solving physics problems? I doubt it; and he probably wouldn't have had as much fun.
The latter won't work for you as-is:

scala> def doFoo(x: Some[Int]) = x.get*2
doFoo: (x: Some[Int])Int

scala> def doFoo(x: None.type) = None
doFoo: (x: None.type)None.type

scala> doFoo(Option(3))
<console>:9: error: type mismatch;
found : Option[Int]
required: None.type
doFoo(Option(3))
^

But it will work as either of these:

scala> def doFoo(x: Option[Int]): Option[Int] = x match {
| case Some(n) => Some(n*2)
| case _ => None
| }

scala> def doFoo(x: Option[Int]) = x.map(_*2)
doFoo: (x: Option[Int])Option[Int]
Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6CnwYpP...
Yeah in this case it was totally the former, on good terms, I'd highly recommend working at the place post-fire, and many of my colleagues, including the guy who had to do the fire and didn't necessarily agree with me offered to be a reference. I'd be a reference for him as well, any day.

I'm with you on the personal space per employee thing with communal areas being the right way to go, completely. It just seems the new kool-aid to drink is open space big brother/weird style where it seems to be mostly about minimizing sq foot per employee, which sucks, I agree.

Thanks for your comment, it's nice to hear some intelligent feedback :)
I wasn't questioning the usefulness of flossing. I want it to be useful. I'd hate to think of all that wasted time over my adult life!
Wow, quite a testimony. Thank you! Is this it? http://www.hawkee.com/view.php?file_id=205
I've kept an eye on felix-lang the last several months, and the project seems to be progressing continuously.

I'm curious though: has it been used in production? I'd be very interested in reading real use stories, with up and down sides!

Also, how is the community doing, and what about contributors? Do both groups grow?
My "server costs" for my personal web page are $0 as well, I forward the URL to static HTML hosted on Wuala. It gets rewritten to a long, ugly URL nowdays (previously it was just content.wuala.com/.../~LazyJones or something like that), but it works, is reasonably fault-tolerant and can be edited locally on any device I want.
Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs on Charlie Rose
Convert Microsoft Word documents to PDF via API
I'm not sure if I'd consider Facebook's model to be two-sided, at least their startup model. I'd consider two-sided markets to be businesses like eBay or Airbnb.

I remember reading something on Airbnb (it might have been a Mixergy interview) and one of the takeaways for building a two-sided market is to employ promotional tactics that are not scalable. If I remember correctly, Airbnb went to New York City and started knocking on doors to drum up listings. Obviously, such a sales tactic at scale would be extremely expensive and prohibitive, but when starting out, you need that level of intimacy to get off the ground. I believe the other example from that article was a babysitting service where the founder went around town and plastered fliers where appropriate.
Customizability is of the utmost importance if you want to adapt your device to your workflow. I prefer it to adapting my workflow to each device I use (and they are more than one).

But the important part is that a customizable environment works for both parties: those who support and those who oppose customization.
This is a part of a custom malloc(). The test involves running

p = malloc(); free(p);

in a tight loop for 5 seconds, generating about 60,000,000 traversals of the code in question. The slower version yields a loop count of around 67,... and the faster version bumps it to over 70,... Not quite 5%, but in thereabouts.
Is there any way to download the noun project icons as a single zip file?
Anyone have a working Brew update URL?
I said I flagged it because of the unethical nature of the article. Don't manipulate things as you see fit, please.
The fact that we have way more tools is great, but I've found that it can lead to a paradox of choice for those that are just getting started.

There is definitely an element of analysis paralysis, but on top of that, there is the dirty little secret that many web developers don’t like to talk about: you don’t need to use any of these new tools to make a decent web page. Vanilla HTML, CSS and JS work as well as they ever did.

In fact, they are significantly better in many ways, because of course they have also moved on in the past decade. The arrival of simple but effective tools like querySelector in JavaScript negates one of the main reasons we started adopting frameworks like jQuery. There are widely supported elements of CSS3 that mean we don’t have to rely on awkward image-based techniques for basic graphic effects like rounded corners any more. We have web fonts that can handle many simple cases of headings and presentation text where again image replacement techniques used to be the only viable option.

So personally, I’m not sure introducing any novice web developer to all those other tools early on is even a good idea. Everything ultimately comes down to HTML, CSS and JS on the client side, and if you understand how those work, you can already achieve a lot. With experience, you’ll find that some things become repetitive, and others would take a prohibitive amount of effort to implement even if you understand how you would do them. Then you start to understand what kinds of tools you would find useful for your projects, and you can explore what’s out there from an informed starting point and with practical goals in mind.

Without that perspective, I think there is a very real danger of putting the cart before the horse, or in this case, the tools before the results. I’ve lost count of how many blog posts I’ve read in the past year or two advocating this combination of 12 “essential” tools or that “robust, repeatable” development process. It’s remarkable how many of them are hosted on sites that take several seconds to display the home page, struggle to scroll that page up and and down once you get there, use absurdly large fonts on my desktop screen (because they’re responsive, darling[1]), have all the design and typographical sensitivity of inch-high red Vivaldi on a bright green background, and have all the usability of a 2003 e-commerce site.

[1] What do you mean I have no idea what I’m talking about and I’ve completely missed the point of responsive design? I’ve got my responsive object-oriented dynamic grid plug-in library framework right here!
Ask HN: What IRC Channels would you recommend for a programmer?
I recently discovered #startups and wonder what other places might be interesting for a student programmer like me.
Steve Jobs: Rock Tumbler
"The fact that a lineup of white male speakers (because a majority of programmers are male) automatically makes you think that it is an INTENTIONAL act by the event organizers..."

--

You're missing the point. The concern expressed about the predominantly white-dude lineups at popular conference IS NOT that individual conference organizers are purposefully excluding non-white-dude speakers. The people talking about these issues generally go out of their way to explain the difference between INDIVIDUAL bias and SYSTEMIC bias. The latter is not a matter of a conference organizer saying, "Hey! Let's make sure we don't have black speakers!" Instead, systemic bias is the way the status quo of a particular group or culture leads members to make assumptions or automatic decisions that UNINTENTIONALLY exclude certain people.

Think of a web developer building a new site. All of their friends use iOS, they use iOS, and although they don't have anything against Android, their unexamined default assumptions will steer them towards building the mobile version of the site with iOS in mind. Some Android users might still use it, and even get a lot out of it, but many will also be lost to bad UX collisions, mistaken assumptions about browser feature support, and so on. The result can easily turn into a spiral: Android users don't use our site, so working to support them would just be platform zealotry!

A stretched analogy? Perhaps. But it's an example of how unintentional assumptions can leave important groups of people -- with lots of really valuable stuff to contribute -- out in the cold unless work is done up front. It's not about tokenism, or quotas, or assuming bad faith and evil intentions. It's about keeping our eyes open, and listening when people say we're missing something important.
needing to check whether an object is null/"valid" should be an exceptional case

Handily enough, C#, Java and similar languages actually throw an exception when you try to work with a null reference as if it wasn't null. These exceptions are generally only cryptic when the null references are stored somewhere other than the stack before being manipulated. That is, so long as foo(null) throws an exception before foo() returns, it's no big deal to diagnose, and mostly unnecessary to check the value of the parameter as it passes through the graph of method calls.

(To a degree I'm arguing a devil's advocate position, as I have a lot of sympathy for encoding not-null-by-default into the type system.)
False dichotomy. I'd feel less offended if the organizer responded to the question by saying "Here is our fully transparent process that involved reaching out to a large number of qualified people across various cultural lines, and this is the result."

And speaking of false dichotomies, it's INCREDIBLY sexist to suggest that if a woman was be chosen, she was of lower quality than the men and was only picked for her gender. You're implying that women are not qualified to speak at conferences.
Google provides Optional<T> as part of the Guava library, so this is a fairly well-known idea. I find it fairly tedious to use though.

The @NotNull annotation seems like it should be the answer, but I don't know of anyone that uses it. Would love to hear if anyone has figured out how to get value out of @NotNull!
Maybe you didn't get to the end: the author tells us she replaced flossing with mouthwash + xylitol for a month, and by the end of it, her dentist said her teeth were perfect, unlike before. Not a third-party anecdote.
Why You Should Hire Athletes
Watching Your Competitors Release "Your" Features
Banning null doesn't seem to have stopped their site from falling over.

There doesn't seem to be a google cache available.