skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with static and singletons have been adressed by the creator, Taylor Otwell. Heres a quote (http://forums.laravel.io/viewtopic.php?pid=3237)from him regarding the static methods in laravel 4.

"Yeah, this [static methods/singletons] is something I have thought about a lot.

I have gone from everything totally static, to everything totally dependency injected, to somewhere in between. The criticisms of static methods are certainly valid. If you'll notice in the Laravel core code, the router, session handling, and database stuff is actually pretty thoroughly dependency injected. When the Laravel core creates the session payload, it injects the driver. That allows me to unit test the framework more thoroughly since I can inject mocks and stubs.

Problems I have run into with using DI throughout the framework is that you start to fight against the global state that exists within PHP itself. For instance, functions like "file_get_contents" and "file_exists"... you have to have some way to mock those.

I have actually moved Laravel totally off of static methods before to see what it would be like, and it's not too bad. I think in the future it's possible more classes will be moved off of static methods.

To dig deeper into Laravel, there is actually an abstract "Facade" class that makes you think a class is static when it's not. For instance, when you do "Session::get", you are actually hitting the Laravel\Facades\Session class, which is resolving the session payload out of the IoC container and then calling the method you want. It's a trick to give you convenient access while still keeping the framework somewhat testable.

So, I totally agree with the articles. The struggle so far has just been to find a good balance point for Laravel. Writing testable code is still up to the developer to an extent. You can use the IoC container to inject a database connection instead of just using the DB static methods. However, things like the Input, URL, File, etc. classes still being static could lead to some testability problems. I've broken encapsulation on the Input class just to make it a little more testable. You can set the Input just by saying "Input::$input = array()".

This is probably way more information than you wanted, but just letting you know this is something I have thought about a lot. Symfony2 has probably done the best job of keeping things testable that I know of. I think Laravel's testability is decent as it stands, but I know there are things that could make it better."
I don't have the numbers at hand, but I've heard of a study saying that suicide very often is a very impulsive action. Saying that in most cases there's less than an hour between deciding to commit suicide and the action itself (numbers might be off here).

Looks like I got it from a Freakonomics podcast [1]: "One academic study looked at attempted suicides in Houston among 15 to 34 year olds. It found that in 70 percent of the cases, the time between deciding to commit suicide and taking action was under an hour. Seventy-percent of the cases. For about one-quarter of the people involved, the time gap was five minutes or less."

Of course, from this it doesn't follow that a hotline it necessarily effective. Luckily britta already posted links to some studies.

[1] http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/06/21/the-suicide-paradox-f...
I know a few doctors in the UK and they don't understand two things:

- they are a reasonably efficient expert system

- large scale data mining can find patterns of behaviour and disease that are impossible to find any other way.

Point one can partly be explained by the fact that as a society we rightly respect doctors and as humans over the years they take it to heart that they really are quite special. They also rightly diagnose hundreds of common illnesses a week which boosts their ego.

Point two is a common problem for people outside of the tech world. Doctors are used to small studies growing to large studies about a specific illness. They do use meta studies and use large scale statistics to medicate (everyone over 60 gets cholesterol medication etc) but that is the exception. They don't understand that an abstract statistical analysis of patient records could deliver gold.

So when asked to codify patients notes (something they have to do in the NHS using a ridiculous DOS based app, with over the top word templates for paper forms) they resent it. They don't feel the advantage of this. When the system controls their flow they feel like they are robots and that this gets in the way of their treatment of the patient.

It pains me to have to explain to them that they are, for the vast majority of patient interactions, meat robots. For 99% of their interactions they are slower and less accurate than an expert system (although of course the doctors I know have a more pleasing interface than a robot).

They can't see that if the burden of the 99% was lifted they could genuinely help their patients by having more time. Instead they insist awareness campaigns are the way to go: "If less people came in to the surgery with a cold we could DOUBLE the time they spent with patients"
I'm going to argue that if we did a global switch to UTC, current trends are already leading to border time zone regions migrating their schedules closer together (the American "day" has been steadily getting later in the actual day over the last century, and I'd argue that is in part due to a business-wise synching of times with west Europe).

We are caring less and less about when the sun is out. I figure in a few centuries, a lot of communities will be massive buildings without any sun exposure anyway. We will be flying through space and metrics like the height of the sun over the horizon no longer matter. Time isn't something best represented as arbitrary numbers across datelines, it is best represented as a consistent, constantly incrementing value. The fact the sun rises and sets in different parts of the world at different times isn't an excuse to keep the time system reflecting a giant ball of plasma that less and less drives our daily activities.
Federal checks soon electronic, not paper
Ask HN: is there an alternative for instagram?
something like ownCloud hosted on my own server, but not just a gallery-skript, but connected with an app to share photos easy from my phone?
What features should such a solution need?
Aaron Swartz on illness and depression
Actually, I think it's reasonable to say that if someone is so depressed, their responsible diminishes as the pain deepens. It's a terrible thing and if he was unwell he can't really be classed as responsible surely?

There have been a few people in my life who have committed suicide. Knowing what they went through, feeling it a lot myself, it often feels like the only way out, the only way it will bring an end to your pain. It's not true but it feels totally like that, like you have absolutely no option.
The average sentence for criminals convicted of rape in the United States is 117 months. The average time served is 65 months.
Also mirrored here: https://gist.github.com/4517310
New climate row: Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming
> Not Turkey

Well, maybe not Turkey as it hasn't been defeated in any wars nor committed large war atrocities, but the predecessor state the Ottoman Empire was effectively dismantled by the treaty of Sevres at the end of the first world war, and the only reason the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the German side was the minister of war going behind the prime minister's back and signing a secret defensive treaty with the Germans. The original plan was to remain neutral as the government of the time knew it couldn't fight a war against the British and French or the Germans without losing territory, and that by remaining neutral it would leave options open for alliances should Russia invade.

Because of this, the Ottoman Empire was partitioned and dismantled, leaving only Istanbul and a small surrounding strip of land. It was this that led to former military commanders fighting the independence war that led to the creation of the modern Turkish republic.
>Oh, no you do not understand at all. Depression cannot be dealt with just with an 'ordinary and structured life': it is an illness. It has existed always.

While there are cases of physiological depression (an actual illness) in the staggering majority of cases it's not an illness but an easy cop-out to deny any major wrong with societal structure and the modern way of life.

"The fact that there are specialists" just means that the medical industry has found another profitable malaise to exploit -- similar to all those BS ADD prescriptions.

Ironically, Aaron Swartz conveyed this quite well in one of his posts "fix the factory, not the workers":

"And when the system isn’t working, it doesn’t make sense to just yell at the people in it — any more than you’d try to fix a machine by yelling at the gears. True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more often you’re just using them in the wrong way. When there’s a problem, you shouldn’t get angry with the gears — you should fix the machine."

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nummi
The plugin is for end users who want automate the process of giving consent, similar to how a password manager plugin might help you automate the login process.

The page has a section on "Making my website Compatible". The plugin explicitly looks for the "CookiesOK" CSS class. This plugin is designed and partially aimed at web developers.

If a web developer wants to make their site compatible with CookiesOK to improve the browsing experience for the subset of their users with the plugin, what's the harm?

Well it's against the law. The harm depends on your country. It could be a fine of thousands of euro, and potentially an injunction shutting down your website.
There are 2 use cases for UTC:

1. People who don't leave their regional time zone very often.

2. Those that do.

The first group of people would have a week where they aren't used to getting up at 1:00 or eating lunch at 23:00. But that won't last long, because the schedule maintains consistency and people would just shift their hours accordingly.

The second group can now plan a flight, report the time they are landing to a colleague, not have to worry about time zone conversions, schedule a meeting 2 hours after that and know exactly how long in the future that is without worrying. An international conference call can just be scheduled for 5:00, and you don't need to mix time zones to figure out when that is. Two business associates can say "I'm available from 12 - 2, and you are available from 1 - 3, but since we use UTC we don't need to actually change those times to make them match, we just know the overlap".

That second use case is the one where current time systems are woefully inadequate, but because the majority of people persist in the first kind of time system, there isn't enough pressure to change to benefit the second. It requires coordinated effort, that a tiny wink of time where people have to adjust to a shift in the hour they get up or eat in the day is much worth the benefits of not having international commerce and business have to constantly adjust their times and do mental gymnastics to keep cross-time-boundary timekeeping in check.
Nicely written, yes, but today's news is not a testament to those writings' effectiveness.
https://www.google.com/search?q=doj+presecute gives me :
DOJ Will Not Prosecute Goldman Sachs in Financial ... - ABC News
9 Aug 2012 – The Justice Department has decided it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or its employees for their role in the financial crisis...

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity

Share the load
Even if your friends aren’t cheerful, just working on a hard problem with someone else makes it much easier. For one thing, the mental weight gets spread across both people. For another, having someone else there forces you to work instead of getting distracted.
It's a red herring. People will naturally adjust their sleeping, working and leisure time by 1 hour so the extra hour of sun will have disappeared completely. In fact it may have already happened, consider what time your grandparents used to start work with what time you start work.
You bring a good point to the thread about sins of the father, although you might not have realised it.

The Armenian government claims that the Turkish government is responsible for the Armenian genocide, although the Turkish republic (and it's government) didn't exist at the time. This is a bit like blaming the US for atrocities committed by the republic of Texas in California.

The decision about censoring the Armenian genocide is purely political and saddens me, but it's more to do with geopolitics than history.
>>"taking responsibility". Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan all have received the wrath of US military power and paid

With "take responsibility" in English afaik, it means that you take responsibility for the situation (often implied I believe -- that you caused). If something else is implied by the expression, please enlighten me.

I have a hard time believing that Japan would start doing military adventures. It is, more or less, a functioning democracy. See the democratic peace theory, not even USA makes wars against democracies...

(And about your examples... Syria could use some responsibility from the self proclaimed world cop. It is a horror story probably worse than ex Yugoslavia; a shame for Obama. It just doesn't fit his priorities.)
I'll consider it enough when I no longer get light headaches reading subpixel-rendered text on a desktop LCD at 18 - 24". My 1080p 22" display has ~100 PPI and that makes my head ache. That 27" 4k resolution display would have 160 PPI, which might be enough for me. But the 1440p 27" display only has 120 PPI and I still get headaches off that.

It is the same thing as FOV in FPS games. Some people get really bad headaches with narrow FOV on widescreens, some don't. If the 1440p 27" display is good enough for you, then just don't buy a more expensive 4k display at that resolution. Or get a 32" 4k display and get more space. I'm gonna get the 27" one because it feels easier on my eyes, probably at a price premium. I'm fine with that, I just want the pixel density.
For those that want to see how China is changing: Don't visit China. Visit Hong Kong.

No other place exemplifies the rise of the Chinese middle/upper class like it does. The size and popularity of the high end boutique labels e.g. LV, Hermes, Zegna, Gucci far exceeds that of Tokyo, Paris, London, New York. If Apple does cement the iPhone as a status symbol alongside the LV bag it is going to soak up a tremendous amount of profit.
In the US maybe, but I could easily see something like this happening in Scandinavia. Sweden already has a lot of provider-neutral municipal fiber.
And their Java applet stops password managers such as LastPass, 1Password etc from working, and you cannot even copy/paste into its input fields.

I have nothing against Java or the JVM, but applets that require "full access" to your computer just to sign you in is pretty backwards. To be honest, I don't trust their code to behave on my computer, but if I don't give their applet full access, I cannot use my bank online..

I have no idea why they decided to go this route, and why it's not just a 5 minute javascript job to actually fix it.
The tortoise and the Octocat (and how software impacts culture)
oh aren't you special.

http://xkcd.com/610/
I kinda wish if an email has '10am EST' it would have a little hover tooltip to show it in my local timezone. I'm sure once people started noticing it and how useful it is you'd get more people putting timezones in their emails.
Aaron, thank you for all you've done. It's had a tremendous impact on my life.

Aaron had a really interesting blog post on pain worth reading called, "Leaning into the Pain". It's worth considering that pain doesn't just impact the individual. Try to let others help. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio
Part of my extreme, EXTREME shock at the tragic, horrible news about Aaron was quite how much I enjoyed this series + found it utterly engaging. Usually stuff on this topic is full of bullshit, but Aaron really had some very interesting things to say here.

Another wonderful, challenging and important article was the one on faith in science - http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sciencefaith.

RIP Aaron.
...except that they're using statistics rather than telepathy!
I don't know if I should admire Nolan or Swartz after reading this.
You should also be giving those avatars height attributes. When some of them load in slower (Also, I see you're loading them @2x, essentially), it shifts the formatting of the page a bit.
I'd like to write something nice, but I'm in too much shock to even know where to start. He showed his brilliance through code and his humanity through his writing.

And as much as it is "right" to respect him for his very personal decision, I can't help but wish he were still here. This is the premature end of the life of someone who could have dramatically changed the world. Reminds us that, now more than ever, that's our job here, too.
> "Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide."

Haunting.

edit : It's an insightful piece of writing purely in its own right, as are the rest of his works that I have come across.
I imagine it'll get black barred in the morning (california time). Apart from everything else Aaron Schwartz was also a YC alumni from YC's very first class in summer 2005.
Ketamine may be effective, but is it useful for 'immediate' prevention? I suppose this depends on what you mean by 'immediate'. Someone already posted a link here suggesting a significant number of suicides are impulsive, and many people have planned suicides without their friends or family having any idea.

I can't see how in many of these situations a controlled drug is going to help. We could only administer ketamine to those who exhibit depression or suicidal tendencies, but sadly these signs are not always visible or picked up.
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

rip
The Pakistani government couldn't argue that, but Japan and most every other country ("It was a previous government, doesn't reflect us as a country at all"). It isn't that simple, sadly.
I'm sure the black bar isn't there because PG happens to be asleep. Its unfortunate that he'll wake up to such bad news.
It depends on the terms agreed during the merger.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (and a bunch of other people from each of X.com and Confinity) are considered members of the set of PayPal founders, for instance.
> How many diapers does America go through in one month?

"One too many, if you make me work on J2EE."
Learning by doing is probably the way most people learn their unixcraft. It also helps if you have a friend or a team member who is a lot more experienced than you, a go-to guy with infinite patience to your stupid questions.

I had the privilege of working with a badass russian unix hacker for some time, he taught me how to do black magic with find, grep, sort and uniq.
True. What I'm terribly annoyed with is a simple news article being broken up into 2+ pages when it really doesn't need to be. But, this is done to increase both traffic and advertisement impressions. Now I won't even read the rest of an article if it contains more than one page (unless it's something really interesting).
I'm trying to decide if you are being sarcastic :)

For people who don't leave their own timezone very often (which is most people), there is thousands of years of background of the concepts of midnight, midday. There is a shared language around the world as to what happens at certain times, which would be destroyed by this.

If you want to organise meetings by UTC, why not just say "I'm available at 12-2 UTC"? See if it catches on (it certainly won't with most people who don't care about meeting in multiple time zones).
I'm taken! why didn't I thought that how the heck did deaf people wake up for work .. really, I had no idea how difficult it is for those of them who work.
In April 2011 i was accused of a small crime that could have given prison also. I was judged in January 2012 and accused to pay a fine of 500€ despite the accusation had no proofs. Every day i though about how to prove my innocence despite being a small accusation, it destroyed my work and mood for the whole year.

How to fix ? if no damage was done there is nothing to accuse of.

And distribution of knowledge should be free, or ransom ware the release of that info to the public should be made available upon compen$ation for the work done, ransomware maybe.

Aaron ideals of greater good and sharing are nobler than any politician or any other bullshitter that get media coverage and have the power to change the world for the better.
"Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide." :`(

[Edit to note that this is his final blog post, per http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047440 .]
In this blog article, he speaks a little about his illness -

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick
Sublime Text has this annoying habit as well. The command palette and switch-file list show gray/lightgray on the list. I can never remember which is selected and which is not.

That's probably my single big annoyance in Sublime Text.
That "it wasn't" doesn't mean that "it could not have been" (which was the point the other guy made).

This is more than an elementary logical mistake on your part, this is pure crazy.

By the same logic all those COBOL and Java applications that are deployed for something major (from banking to taxation to multi-national logistics) prove that COBOL and Java are as good as Lisp (and irreplaceable at that, seeing that "there wasn't something else deployed in their place").

What app was used in ONE war doesn't matter at all to explain which language is better than another.

Lots of far more crucial operation than the logistics in a minor war held by a superpower to a small third world country, used other languages. For example, NASA missions used assembly and C.

Does that prove anything relate to the suitability of those languages in general?

Quit the BS Lisp-proselytisation with bogus arguments and hand-waiving.
How to easily encrypt a file with GPG on Linux
Any relative lack of notability vs. the others HN has black-barred was because he died so young.

Think of all the things he likely would have done over the next 60 years if he slowed down even 50%.
Mozilla WebDev: Switching to pip for Python deployments
LOL! "Coalition for Peace Against LISP".
I noticed that too. That seemed to be a recurring concept in Aaron's work. It must have been weighing heavily on his mind for a long time.

Rest in peace, brother. Your efforts will not have been in vain.
Does anyone know the full background story on this? Every time I hear the story, it was mostly Alexis and Steve including the retelling of how they pitched PG. Where did Aaron fit in and how does that story go?
If you have (or suspect you have) depression, you are lucky to live in the UK, because at least you do not need to worry about being denied health insurance because of a previous diagnosis.
I meant in the context of someone about to commit suicide and calling a helpline. Send someone over, give them an injection and you've bought a few months of time during which they can recieve therapy. A lot of failed suicide attempts tend to get repeated. It would solve that issue very well.