skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That means whenever you call it you always getting it back - this is behavior of a constant.

No! You're confusing functions-as-callable-things and functions-as-values. The phrase "a constant" does not generally imply anything about a thing's behavior when called. It just means something whose value will never change. A self-evaluating constant is a constant that circularly evaluates to itself — nothing else can have that value without referring to the constant. But neither of these things have to do with calling anything; they're just about taking values.

A constant can certainly refer to a function that returns something other than that constant. For example, in Ruby: `Example = lambda { 1 }`. If you just evaluate "Example", you will get a Proc value, but if you call Example, you will get the Fixnum 1.

In most languages that have them, you cannot call a self-evaluating constant. It won't return itself — it's just not a callable thing. In Clojure, keywords are self-evaluating constants that have the behavior of looking themselves up as a key in the argument when called. They serve the purpose of self-evaluating constants exactly the same as in other languages, but they also have the handy property of doing map lookups.
1950's SC-FI would give an insight into the technology mindset of the time and what they expected in the future then. Or could ask any number of the 62 year olds today online. But if you suddenly transported a person from the 1950's into today then technology would be the least of the area's of todays society for them to get there heads around. Object size and small computers would be one and one which would they would appreciete would be the size of radio's and general media quality as back then there was still in the valve days with a populas at not aware of any changes on that front. This along with general building of anything and the big is best mentality being the fashion of the day.

I also think that it is supprising what technology they would expect and what we actualy have today at consumer level. They would be expecting robot servants and a automated house.

Youtube has a 1957 house of the future video that is worth a watch if you want a better answear of the times http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VowfYuhx1-o

a google picture or article search on "1950s home of the future" brings up much more of the period articles of the time.

I think the first thing somebody in the situation of comming from 1950 into today suddenly would ask is "so are the cars not flying", why do the houses look smaller and not much different and in many area's will be asking is that it, oh.

So sadly as a whole the vision from the 1950's is still in many area's the vision today.

Probaly the only area which has lived upto expectations would be car production assembly lines with robots, they did love there robots of the future in those days and we still do aspire and love them today.
How many of the projects delivered products to their backers within 3 months of the Estimated Delivery Date?
Because other parties could work out a person's identity from their regular point of origin/journey route, and thereby invade their privacy.
The end goal is control and affectless dominance so much less harmless, even if the reality is a bunch of sad creepers in fedoras.
Sorry for the confusion - did I meantion I found Trello greatly executed? :)
Why we shouldn't use css viewport in ie10 for now
They are porting the engine to Linux.
One of the main advantages is that this allows Linux developers to develop natively and use Linux libraries and toolchains.
I can't get past "Loading your fonts" on Chrome.
Driverless cars can't come to market fast enough.
The Steam "box" is unlikely to be treated as much like a true console by developers when it comes to hitting the metal because Valve is still very much committed to the PC market and their public statements about TV gaming suggest they see themselves as only one of many providers for the "Steam on TV" experience.

Unlike a "true" console, they are likely to define a chipset-neutral minimal spec for games, which means the development model will be more PC-like than console-like.
Vest in Peace Instagram
It's like you've taken every good thing done recently to PHP and turned it on its head.

Protip: You exclude closing ?> tags from your files because if there's a new line after them, you'll get the headers already sent error, which is a big headache to track down.
I have a little experience in Python, it's also nice languague.
"Just try to picture what the situation would be without it"

It is not hard to picture, because drug prohibition began a century ago in the USA. Back when drugs were legal here, things like the Industrial Revolution happened. Society was not some kind of pit of despair when drugs were legal; we had problems, sure, but we still have problems today and the drug war has not solved any of the problems we had previously (but it did introduce many of the current ones).

"the sentences doesn't seem quite harsh"

Jail time is a harsh sentence. America is so far to the right these days that we tend to think that putting someone in prison for "only" five years is not harsh.

It is not just about the sentencing. Right now, we have tens of thousands of paramilitary raids on civilian homes each year; property is damaged, dogs are shot, and people are killed. These raids are not reserved for the most dangerous criminals; they are routinely used to serve search and arrest warrants against people who are either unarmed or only lightly armed. Many thousands of innocent bystanders have been killed by the paramilitary teams that carry out these raids, as have many thousands of innocent people whose homes were incorrectly targeted.

Worse still, the very paramilitary forces that carry out these raids are allowed to keep the proceeds from the sales of property seized in the course of their duties for their own department budget. Some police forces have become "self funded" as a result. It is a case-study in slippery slopes.

This has not helped to solve our drug problems. Not only are people still using drugs, but the drugs they are using are causing unnecessary harm. Methamphetamine is not necessarily a destructive drug; it actually has medical uses (as a treatment for narcolepsy, ADHD, and for appetite control), and is sold by the pharmaceutical industry under the name Desoxyn. Yet people who want to use this drug recreationally cannot buy it legally (it is a felony to transfer it to someone who lacks a prescription and a felony to prescribe it unnecessarily) and wind up buying it from black-market sources, receiving a product that was produced under poorly controlled circumstances and which is frequently adulterated with the byproducts and waste from the production process (these cause far more harm than the drug itself; it is these adulterants that give methamphetamine abusers their "sickly" look). Likewise with opiates: heroine is often "cut" in ways that are poorly controlled, and on at least one occasion a black-market opiate dealer sold MPTP, a drug that permanently induces Parkinson's disease, after failing to properly manufacture the opiate MPPP.

So if someone were not on some moral crusade and actually wanted to address the problems society has with drugs -- someone like me -- they would support a complete repeal of the war on drugs and an entirely different approach. We manage to produce and distribute alcohol in a regulated manner. We don't need to throw people in prison, we just need to ensure that people don't kill themselves or anyone else and that if a person needs help, they can get it.
Worked ok for me - windows chrome
What this post doesn't describe is usage numbers per person. I wonder how many Tumblr users are also Facebook, Snapchat, etc. users...? Also, how many respondents chose none of the options?
If you listen to the conversation 35 mins (I've done so 3x times), it's very insightful.

This is the kind of stuff that a growth hacker really gets. The way I see it, in the B2B market, outside of Hubspot, very few companies are doing this as a solid lead generation and lead conversion strategy.
So what does the 1000000th user win? Nothing? I'm disappointed. ;-)
Okay, tell me this. Is this the right md5sum?

775361fdc57dca8689d99f2b390bf258 out

That's including the full output from your not-really-HTTP server on 12345, specifically version "Jan 7 2013 16:37:48".
It's surprisingly easy to de-anonymize an anonymized dataset. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live... Just because the researchers decided to keep their subject's privacy doesn't mean they should publish the data for any troll to play with.
Hmm, if you thought the person that told you that leaving out closing tags was a noob then what does that make you :)? It is a good practice to leave out closing tags, RTFM to learn when and why.

Edit:
After reading the rest of your comment I don't think you really learned or experienced much over 14 years. It also goes to show how misleading experience in number of years can be.
Kickstartes is absolutely amazing. Any 3rd party statistics of project deliveries after they were funded?

Delays are common, but they are acceptable (at least for me), but I wonder how much actually never delivered anything close to the promises.

Anyway, I would guess it is still far better than most VCs.
Nice, I like the forward thinking by ford on this. I only wish next they open up the engine controller, and let the real hackers in!
If I implied that I doubted them, then I failed to communicate my point effectively -- I am very curious about how to turn a class allocate + instance_variable_set into remote code exec. I see how you can create the arel objects for sqli, but not arbitrary ruby.
I just took a quick peek at the Java and Ruby tutorials you linked, and indeed they both talk about prepared statements. Unfortunately for PHP, so many of the tutorials that are still around are very old. We have the same issues with Javascript. If one uses Google to search for a solution to a JS problem, often she or he is confronted with a solution from 1999... which is FAR from today's "best practices". Finding a 10 year old page discussing Python or Ruby connecting to MySQL is nearly impossible due to the newness in these languages in the web arena. (Yes, Zope existed way back when.)

I do agree that the above example is the rule rather than the exception as most books I've owned show something similar or worse:

foreach($_POST as $key => $value) {
${$key} = $value;
}

That's almost as convenient as that magic global form garbage they used to have turned on by default.

I was under the impression though that the MySQLi adapter and PDO both made use of prepared statements. All we need to do now, is clean up the last few years of cruft/misinformation still floating around.
It is nontrivial to make data so anonymous NO ONE can deanonymize it. It's considerably easier to make data anonymous in a way that people acting in good faith to not try to deanonymize it won't realize who is who
One thing that made me blink here is that there's no economies of scale in the pricing - there's no benefit for me to sign up for more tests at once. It's likely there's a good reason for this but I thought I'd bring it up as users can always just keep buying Starter packs.

[edit]
Also, does having experienced web users as your usability testers not defeat the object? I always thought that the idea of usability testing was to see how well non-technical users could navigate and use your site or app?
Laravel is my first experience with php frameworks.

I have yet to actually finish a project in it which is disappointing (for something whose entire purpose is to make finishing projects faster) but I really like it. It's been a huge educational experience for me.
There's a limit to how much such data can be truly anonymized, especially when it can be combined with other data sources.

Would you be ok with someone relating an "anonymized" database of fingerprints? Of sequenced human genomes? Of credit card transactions? Anonymization is tricky.
The problem is that people could be insincere, non-rational or ignorant. I doubt they will know what their problems are, what they are willing to pay or what the solution could be. There's a great quote by Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

For Nathan his pain point could be something related to writing and publishing books. I think this would be a much better problem domain since he is a user and I am sure he has some problems regarding this process that could be improved.
> not including apc which shouldn't be necessary anymore

APC is a bit more than an opcode cache. It can be used like memcache, although restricted to the machine it's running on. It's my understanding that it is a part of hhvm?
Minimongoid or: How I learned to love Meteor
I've seen a few social media sites before, and HN's upvote button looks how I expect an upvote button to look, and it's positioned where I expect an upvote button to be (next to a corresponding downvote button). Most importantly, it only activates with a mouse-click, which is the conventional way for a user to request some kind of state-change on the web.

By contrast, the kudos widget looks like nothing in particular, its location doesn't correspond to any convention I'm aware of, and mild curiosity (mouseover) is taken to mean enthusiastic support.

To me, the kudos widget makes me feel like somebody took advantage of me in an unguarded moment and stole a dollar. It's not much, in the grand scheme of things, but rubs me the wrong way.
People seem to forget that enterprisey code is drastically different from your own small projects. Having even composer in multi-person dev teams that have niche understandings can drastically improve code quality because it tends to lend itself to componentized architecture. This alone will help you escape the typical procedural nightmares if you are so inclined to do so.

PEAR was crap and lent itself to crap code. Composer is the opposite and it shows. Github and composer really should be the winners of PHP 2012 (aside from the advancements in PHP itself) as they alone have transformed the landscape in very tangible ways. I'd give props to Symfony too as they have forced most other frameworks to begin thinking outside the monolithic framework mindset.

Then again I suppose it's a little naive to expect people to escape their bubble of understanding, but I can keep on hoping.
They already have, and it should take legal force soon. It won't be all sunshine and roses though, there will be plenty of scammers who will abuse the system and take advantage of people. But that's true with every form and variety of investment.
The two statements are consistent. In order to do the analysis they need to keep track of the full paths that the individual drivers make. Given the paths, particularly over a period of time, it is easy to identify individuals, even if you dont have their names to begin with.
Google To Stop Free Access To Its Search Engine? Until You Sign-In
Closet Bayesian
This is actually the first I'm seeing about strong_parameters, since I don't follow Rails 4 stuff much right now. Thanks for the tip!
Less than 2 years ago, I bought a "cutting edge" Android smartpone, called the Samsung Infuse. Almost two years later, Samsung has yet to release a single update to Gingerbread (from Froyo) over the cell network. A few months ago, they were nice enough to put out a buggy Gingerbreak update to the device, but it was hosted on their website, required me to install software on my computer just to load it, and it then failed (repeatedly) to install on my phone. The Trello app won't work on Froyo, so, no, thanks to the fact that Samsung doesn't give a shit about its customers, I don't have Trello on my phone. I just want to add that the Samsung Infuse, at the time of purchase, was a top of the line phone in the store. Same (subsidized) price as an iPhone. Within 6 months of purchase, it was completely abandoned by Samsung. HTC will be getting my business for the next purchase.
That should be pretty easy to scale up. The past couple of weeks have established a decent precedent. Just have an endpoint called vuln_present or similar.

"return true;"
Original project scope for the Macintosh (1980)
This post is specially relevant for me, since last weekend I've decided to take a quick look at Clojure, as one of my personal goals this year is to get acquainted with a Lisp dialect.

From my _very_ short experience (I've started coding a simple game), here are my two cents:

- If your application is heavily dependent on state, which changes continuously and must be maintained during most of the execution time - like a game - it may not be a good fit. You'll waste a lot of working around the fact that each modification results on new objects.
- If your application comprises mainly of short requests that may create some state that will most certainly be discarded shortly after - like a web application - then I think it's a good fit and you'll probably enjoy it better.

Once again, I've just got started with it, so take this with a grain of salt :)
I can't speak to text, but you don't necessarily have to watch them. InfoQ offers MP3 downloads of talks, so you could listen to them on your commute, on a walk/bike ride/jog, etc. You'll still get 80% - 95% of the value.

I second fogus' comment about the Joy of Clojure, as well. I started with Simple Made Easy and the Value of Values before I even jumped into Clojure, and the Joy of Clojure dovetails quite nicely with all of the above.
Browser Based RabbitMQ Simulator Sneak Peek
Haha, "too big to fail".

Every company can fail tomorrow. Free or paid.
Hash Table Shootout 2:  Rise of the Interpreter Machines
The number of security patches to a popular open source project has only a very weak correlation to the actual number of security holes.
Ask HN: What should I do with my MVP?
I spent a few months worth of evenings developing an MVP for a site that would facilitate trading clothes using a proxy economy (http://tradello.com). Since completing it I have had other project of mine find a fair amount of success and can no longer focus on this one. What should I do with it? Do you think I could sell it for a nominal fee?
I don't know about "great code", just a lot of it, but I've done this for more than 12 years (mostly because we're not really successful at hiring the kind of people we want and need - blame it on the country and our Perl ecosystem), so it can work.

My opinion is that it's doable to some extent, but not satisfactory because you'll feel like you need to be doing much more of either of these things.
The piece is a powerful and very coherent analogy relating modern "slut shaming" to the classic The Scarlet Letter.

I'm not sure this comparison holds. AFAIK the girl in question in this case was not cheating on anyone; she simply made a bad choice of which boy to have sex with. Hester Prynne committed adultery (and with a minister to boot), and it was the adultery that got her the scarlet letter. Not at all the same thing.
3.2.11 not 3.2.10.

Which is in fact why it's probably wiser to list `gem 'rails', '~> 3.2.10'` (or 3.2.0 or anything) instead, and then `bundle update rials` will update you to latest 3.2.x (but never 3.3.x), in this case 3.2.11, instead of only to the exact version you specified (3.2.10, incorrectly).
This is amazing. Thank you so very much!

I was very impressed by responses to queries like this:

howdoi retrieve the keys from an array of hashes in ruby

hash = {"apple" => "fruit", "carrot" => "vegetable"}
array = hash.keys #=> ["apple", "carrot"]
All user number claims from anyone are dubious. Just compare them all with a grain of salt. :)
I have been at 9 events where Microsoft developer relations people have done WinPhone demos to iOS devs. Events with >50 people, all iOS devs of some sort.
The Hybrid Cloud is Great for Patching and Testing
I dont get it?
The trasaction fetch memory exhaustion attack (TFMEA)
Haha, well I'm no industrial designer, so who knows what it ought to look like... but if it looks like this image, you can be sure I won't ever have one sitting next to my TV.

I'm not really interested at this point anyway, but an ugly hardware design virtually seals the deal.
Have you considered moving out of New Zealand?

I'm not sure of your experience or personal life as it's not stated but if you've been working a steady 9-5 as a Network Engineer for a few years you likely have some money saved up I'd assume?
What's stopping you from renting a small place in the U.S. or Europe (or even Australia?) and start looking for companies you'd want to work for?

On a side note I'm not going to pretend like I'm some huge risk taker, but from your post it seems at some point you're just going to have to leave your comfortable job and jump. What do you have to lose?
If you continue down this path you'll only become more depressed. If you move onto trying to make cool shit and do well, then congrats! If you so happen to fail or hate it then there will always be another 9-5 for a big company to come back to.

Some food for thought, good luck.
>> came away with the strong sense that they're of unusually low quality

I couldn't agree more. I guess I'm out of the loop of the drama involved, but every article I've read seems very light/thin, and had no real substance, outside of the standard SV gossip. I actually kinda go out of my way to avoid reading them when I see a svtle link on HN...
I bought a fitbit one from the UK amazon store. It works great, though I am a little concerned by the idea upthread that it can be lost so easily!
> Exactly, why is the principal of the school calling the girls mother?

Perhaps because the girl is going to be the target of a lot of cruel taunting at school from her peers, which could make her depressed or even suicidal. How is that not something the mother should be told about?
Watch Ed Bellis Discuss Risk I/O on TastyTrade's Web Series
In this recording, Ed Bellis, CEO/Founder of Risk I/O, discusses Risk I/O on TastyTrade's "Bootstrapping in America" program.
> Perhaps a more important question would be whether PHP scales codebase-wise in larger projects.

Yes, it does. From my experience and apparently, that of Facebook.
Imdb uses adapted movie quotes for 404 error codes
Most of them are very funny. Examples include:

- This is not the wepage you're looking for. (Star Wars)

- Well, what if there is no webpage? There wasn't one today. (Groundhog Day)
Love love love the colors on the website. Catchy. I'll be using the service soon too!
I've been curious about percentage of success as well. I've seen numbers on this for the first time in this slideshow. See this slide: http://www.kickstarter.com/year/2012#category

(Note that Kickstarter has a fairly selective application process, these figures pertain only to projects accepted on the platform. No idea what percentage of projects are accepted on Kickstarter)
Really? How is owning a stake in the venture worth a thousand times more than owning the thing?