skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can change the encoding of a string. Just jesus christ wow.

erm, wat?

Edit:

To refute some of the points:

> Why on earth does defined? return a string?

Why not? Strings are perfectly valid in boolean context.

> Using blocks for looping and callbacks

again, wat?

> break/next/return semantics in blocks extremely bizzare

This is a somewhat valid point. Well, don't do it then, if you don't know what you're doing!

> And they have different behavior in procs vs. lambdas

> Mutable objects have a hash method and can go in Hashes. Why!!!

Why not? It is possible to shoot yourself in the leg, but otherwise a very useful feature.

> Special case of flip-flop and regexp in an if statement (only if it appears

> syntactically though!)

> Setting `$=` to something truthy causes all string operations to become

> case-insensitive. This and other magic globals from perl are mind blowing.

Perlisms.

> `f {}`. Tell me what the parsing of that is.

Calling f with empty block.

> Ruby's module system makes namespacing optional (and off by default).

So?

> Regexp with named matches decompose into local variables. Dear lord why.

No they don't necessarily, no.

1.9.3-p327 :006 > "abcdefg".match(/(?<x>abc)/)
#<MatchData "abc" x:"abc">
1.9.3-p327 :007 > x
NameError: undefined local variable or method `x' for main:Object

> Encoding system is beyond broken

wat?

> Scopes: constants, class vars, instance vars, methods, locals. wtf.

Valid point.

> Constants aren't constant. Truth in naming.

So?

> Thread locals are really fiber locals.

Valid point.

Overall, a very weak rant.
The article is excellent.

"Finally, I think the instinct to blame the prosecutors in this case should be checked because it is fueled in significant part by a human but improper motive: Making sense of Swartz’s suicide. When a young person commits suicide, there is a natural instinct to restore a sense of order to the world by finding someone to blame. We deal with the sense of shocking and unimaginable and senseless loss by pinning the blame on someone to create a tidy narrative of wrongful actor and wrongful act."

You can disagree with copyright law, mourn Aaron Schwarz, and yet not blame prosecutors for Aaron's suicide and have a sense of proportion.
I third using Sentry. I love it. David has been making huge improvements in the Ruby client in recent weeks.
That's not how it works. The Congress as a whole does not represent the US population as a whole; it's not supposed to, and I'd argue it would be a terrible idea if it did. You have one representative, who represents one district. If the whole Congress represents the whole country, then no individual representative represents any specific area.

If a district in Vermont votes 60% R/40% D in favor of a Republican, and a district in West Virginia votes 5% R/95% D in favor of a Democrat, then that argument would say since the total of the two districts is 32.5% R/67.5% D (assuming equal population districts), the "congress" of two districts should have two Democrats, rather than one of each. The Vermont district should have no effect on the representation of the West Virginia district.

Frankly, I would consider myself more towards the "anti-democratic" side: I'm much more on the side of "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner". Not that the foundation of government shouldn't be democratic, but there need to be very solid protections in place to prevent a majority trampling on a minority. If anything, our system has become too democratic recently; very few of the rights in place to protect us are still respected. (I guess our 3rd Amendment rights are still pretty safe, but other than that.)
The Problem with Kickstarter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
Well for example, the first point ("Defects arising after customer takes delivery") is not quite right.

At least in Germany, if the defect is not the fault of the consumer (dropped tablet/iphone), producer has to repair. And that up to two years.

So Apple is intentionally misleading consumers here, to trick them, to buy this care-product.

But on the other hand - it is a tax on peoples stupidity. If you do not know your basic rights as a consumer, my empathy for you being tricked into such a deal is actually on the same level as my sympathy for apple, attempting such a trick: Next to zero.
Interesting. Thankfully I signed up with one of my disposable gmail accounts. Another problem with giffgaff/O2 is that they compress and artefact every video or large picture one tries to send over their network. They claim its to save you money/bandwidth/data , which is funny as I'm on an unlimited account.
Two words: continuous integration.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/120792448/Continuous-Integration

(I drew these notes up the other day)

PS. Since you appear to be the UK O2, I would add: pay people the same or less but let them work remotely from a more comfortable and healthy environment. Maximum reduction of bureaucracy? Removal of physical environment.
Push Notifications: Worthy or Just A Deterrent
One. It is a very serious mistake to deny someone the right to believe the correctness of their own opinions.

Two. People use leverage. They may or may not use it rightly but they do use it. Anyone who cannot set their opinion of the justice of that to one side, and get on to the business of the contest at hand, is not cut out for politics. Such people enter these contests at a great disadvantage and risk getting hurt.

If you cannot fight with your head then you really should not fight at all. You will very likely lose. You might get hurt, and you might get hurt badly. Politics ain't beanbag.

Three. If you think an attorney able to rise to the position US Attorney will be caught in a "falsifiable claim" on a matter of this prominence then you simply do not understand what you are talking about.
In Memory Of Aaron Swartz: Stealing Is Not Stealing
Facebook Offers Free Calls For IPhone Users In U.S.
ISP today gets to define what approved content is, and there is no end to the methods use to define it. ISP's will continue to expand the sometimes rather arbitrary rules until either government steps in to regulate the industry, or a anti-censorship open by design system will replace the current industry.

First the network allowed everything. Then ISPs started with forbidding child porn as the one and only one exceptional rule. Then it was everything except "illegal content", being everything before with the added inclusion of copyright infringements. Then extreme porn was added, because anti-porn can always be advertised to end-users as a mechanism for protecting children. Then it is "mature content", including anything an ISP might get a letter of complain about, but which does not hurt any business partners. This meant that they can cut cost on support, but at the same time protect any revenue from advertisements. That mean items such as tor, political satire, all form of porn, unpopular religious sites and (anti)social hangouts get listed, but things like alcohol, commercials directed to children, political advertizements, violence and sexual hinting content will be left alone. After that, they start to add items to the list which competes with the ISPs' own products, such as VoIP, but also products that put a strain on their network such as video streaming. The last bans tend to be less severe, as to show how slow competing products are with their low quality of service. This also allow for a mechanism to extract levies from larger companies such as Google without going with a full blown ban that might create outcry from ones consumers.

The market won't regulate itself. There are too few options of consumers, and there exist a clear asymmetrical information gap between buyer and seller. Lemon laws for services could help here, but it would be the same effort or even more effort than to create industry regulations for ISPs.
I love it, I've been with them for 2 years now.
And their unlimited plan is really unlimited. In one month(during the summer) I downloaded 18GB of data, and nobody complained. I rarely call people,so 200 minutes per month is more than enough, and unlimited texts are good as well.

When I was buying my phone, I realized how much money I could save going with them.
I could either go with a 24 month contract for 35 pounds per month and get the phone "free", on a contract which included 500mb of data, 1000 minutes and 1000 texts - spending 840 pounds in total, or just buy the phone outright for 500 pounds and go with giff gaff, spending 740 pounds over the course of 24 months, saving myself a nice 100 pounds and getting a better deal.
Jobric: A smart job search engine that uses artificial intelligence
I know some guy who had to live a week without his Apple laptop after the power supply broke. He went to the store immediately, then they kept his laptop for a week.

Meanwhile, I had a new component of my own built desktop PC broken, went with it to the store and said it didn't work, and they just took it and immediately gave me a new one without any questions asked or even checking the faulty one. Then I also asked if I could buy a PC speaker to hear the motherboard beeps, and they gave a tiny speaker with two wires, for free!

Both of this was in Belgium. So yes, something is wrong with Apple's warranty in Belgium, compared to other shops.
YouTube owner Google poised to take stake in Vevo
Well they are amazing though, so I see no reason at all to leave them. Simply nobody else in the UK offers a deal as good as theirs.
11 Obvious A/B Tests You Should Try
> "I've never dealt directly with their CS..."

They don't have customer support, it's community based (with rewards for those who help). They do have account agents for dealing only with account/billing problems (the only thing you wouldn't want to deal with on a public forum).
This is the same thing they got punished for in Italy, too. In fact, Italy has fined them twice for this crap.

http://gigaom.com/2012/12/21/italy-fines-apple-again-over-ap...
There are quite a lot of Android based desktop computers available, some with better specs and cheaper than the VIA offering.
Just google for "Android USB Mini PC".

This could be a potential problem for Microsoft.
Huh? She's talking about the fact that people claim her office was dangling 35 or even 50 years in jail over Aaron's head. But her office had extended a deal to Aaron which would involve only 6 month's jail time. They had even been open to one that involved no jail time, and JSTOR agreed but MIT did not. (Not that MIT can just tell the DA what to do, but if the DA presents a deal to the judge, and MIT doesn't back them up, that's more likely to be amended by the judge.)
Since at the time the majority of people in South Africa were not allowed to vote, you could hardly call it a democracy.
A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark
I'm pretty sure Google wants to keep both. Chrome-OS,a web-based OS, is a cool experiment whose results are useful to a lot of other things are doing.
I find it odd that there are so many desktop-ish things based on Android instead of Ubuntu. One would get a lot more software and a much more familiar experience with Ubuntu.
That's up to the judge of course. The DA can make recommendations, but they don't decide what the sentence is.
> He broke the law. Which means he is a criminal.

He allegedly broke the law. According to network security expert Alex Stamos, an expert witness in the case, the worst thing you can say about Aaron's actions is that they were "inconsiderate", not criminal.

http://io9.com/5975592/aaron-swartz-died-innocent-++-here-is...
file_get_contents only returns the content of the given file; you must be speaking about something else
The majority of people in ancient Greece couldn't vote either but they definitely had a democracy.
Using blocks for looping and callbacks
* break/next/return semantics in blocks extremely bizzare

Actually they're pretty sensible (return is anyway, break/next are a bit weird but no more so than the rest), the main issues with blocks is the — mentioned — Proc-v-lambda dichotomy and the — not mentioned — block-not-being-first-class issues. Although it's hinted at with further mentions of magical behaviors surrounding blocks.

Blocks, in and of themselves, are a very good base for implementing flow control.
Aaron Swartz memorial #PDFtribute: just another form of slacktivism?
In my experience bike shed meetings are more likely to be about design than other topics. This is probably just because bikeshedding about a green version of Amazon.com is easier than bikeshedding about backoff/retry strategies or sql optimization.
> Well, he prefers Python

More to the point, he comes from Python.

He's also — I believe — working on a ruby (ish?) implementation (or something along those lines), which probably colors his view of what is or isn't annoying. Most of what he lists makes the life of an implementor a living hell.
Sure. But what Ortiz is pulling here is not a Nuremberg Defense ("I was aware of the injustice, but my hands were tied"). She clearly states that she's completely fine with "severe punishment" in "appropriate cases", just that with regards to Aaron, it seemed somewhat inappropriate to her and her office. (I agree that her role, and the role of her office, in Aaron's prosecution suggests the exact opposite, but that's an entirely different question.)
This is about O2 so it's not specific to GiffGaff, it happens to O2 customers who also pay much more for service than on GiffGaff.

Hence it doesn't really address the "too good to be true" comment about GiffGaff in the GP.
To shazaam's credit, it identifies popular songs even in non-english languages (Bollywood, Italian, several French songs; anecdotal evidence anyway)
You can already order what looks to be the baseboard without the case:

http://apc.io/products/rock/

$20 cheaper, and a VGA port :D
You might be able to run raspbian on it, as it seems this device has the same core as the raspberry pi.
It's a good thing they are looking into this.

I always figured that these are not "official" stores thus having limited stock and resupply makes them willing to fight consumers over every small repair, replacement and warranty issue.

When these Apple Stores are charging money for repairs that should have been under warranty or pushing their Apple Care products by stating you only have 1 year warranty they are basically taking advantage of uneducated consumers.

Apple stores in Belgium are an extremely negative experience to say the least, I hope this will change eventually.

Until then you should buy your Apple products through the online apple store, no problems there. ( if you happen to be Belgian )
What's even more annoying is when MBAs go around pronouncing vast generalizations based on which way the wind blowing with no basis in any actual real business. FWIW, I'm not sure if he is doing that, but it sure reads like that.
Short version: "Ruby isn't Python!! wat?!?"
Changing the encoding of a string effectively destroys the data inside. It's entirely useless and potentially very dangerous.

Block-based loops in Ruby are pretty nice, but the semantics could be simpler. Rust gets this right.

Hashable mutable objects are a giant liability. Ruby even has freezing of objects, so it should only allow hashing frozen objects at least.

Ignoring scope by default is extremely stupid and dangerous. Namespacing is pointless if it's off by default.
He just means that if you picked up food and walked out without paying it wouldn't matter if you were caught in the parking lot while trying to escape(and so could return the food immediately) or caught two weeks later at home, long after the food has been eaten.
Those bugs are not a big deal. For a quick checking for correctness there is REPL, and because we're doing mostly functional programming (self-discipline) this is good-enough.

For some protection from being called with wrong arguments there are assertions.

Those who believe that a sophisticated type-system is a protection from idiots, rather than unnecessary burden, seems like come from a corporate Java world, where they believe that something decent could be created by a crowd of mediocre coders piling up "safe" or even "protected" crap.

And of course, Unit tests and CI are our friends.)
'Nightclub bouncer' phishing scam found by researchers
Facebook adds free calling feature for US iPhones
Best of Quora For SEO (ebook)
Can we stop calling something a PC until it comes with a proper input and output device? Let's just call it a CPU, if that is a more accurate term here.

Also wondering if we connect a screen, a USB keyboard and power supply, will it still "blend into the office environment"?
Given the frequency with which Ubuntu pushes updates (every couple of days it seems) and that handling these updates requires an administrative password, I can see sound user experience concerns which Android would better address.
This is humorous to me considering the engineering experience I've had with their site. In a word, lax.

You can attack it from either angle, surely—a tool requires both design and engineering—but you have to strike a balance.

If I had one recommendation, it would be for every engineer to be a designer and every designer an engineer. Only then will you begin to understand the process and problems that the other side faces at every turn.

Anecdotally, being both an engineer and designer has helped me immensely in aspects of each practice in untold ways.

So, yes, the article is right, but they shouldn't be making people think more like designers—that, too, is closed minded and limiting. Aim for a balance between engineering and design that works together. Looking at the problem from any one side is incomplete.
I don't have an issue with most of these. In fact, to me, "ruby allows you to do X, and it shouldn't" is an annoying line of thought. If I want to make my language dance, I don't want it to cry-- I want it to sing along.

There's one that I'll agree with, however, and that's "Inline rescue, no ability to specify what exception."
Looks like it'll make a nice XBMC box!
> And then I'd press the dot key and do the same with the other lines in supposedly longer list.

I am posting this again(posted above about running a macro on a range), but I guess lot of people don't know about this.You need not manually press . on every line. You can run . operator on a range. Do a visual select and then

:'<,'>normal .<CR>

The range('<,'>) is inserted automatically when : is pressed from visual mode. So it boils down to visual mode, select, :normal . <CR>

You can have any ranges you want.

:15,49normal .<CR>

I have a shortcut for visual range defined in my vimrc

vnoremap . :normal . <CR>
> Hashable mutable objects are a giant liability. Ruby even has freezing of objects, so it should only allow hashing frozen objects at least.

Well, of all dangerous things you can do with ruby, this is one of the least dangerous ones. How about "any gem can monkey patch any other gem or even core classes"? Isn't this a giant liability?

Besides, it's not that difficult to make your custom hash that only allows immutable objects for keys.
> Why not? Strings are perfectly valid in boolean context.

That's not a good reason for anything, by that yardstick Array#length could return a float and nil#nil? could return an array. And worse, the `?` postfix in Ruby normally means the method returns an actual boolean, not a "boolean context" (convention over configuration only works if the convention is respected). You can't XOR a string and a boolean (no `^` defined on string, although XOR-ing a boolean and a string will work), you can XOR two booleans.

> Why not? It is possible to shoot yourself in the leg, but otherwise a very useful feature.

I'm not sure, but I think he phrased it badly and asks why "interpreter-provided" mutables (e.g. Array) can be set as hash key: while "user objects" are also hashable by default in Python, built-in collections and the like are specified as unhashable as the semantics are not really sensible:

>>> {{}: 1}
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unhashable type: 'dict'
>>> {set(): 1}
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unhashable type: 'set'

versus

irb(main):002:0> {[] => 1}
=> {[]=>1}
irb(main):003:0> {{} => 1}
=> {{}=>1}
Video: Discovery of the Spider That Builds Spider Decoys
My first thought: That's a short list!
Function and Form. You need to be able to design a system to be an engineer, and the same goes for designers. I would go even further and say that both disciplines are essentially the same with each emphasizing function (engineer), and form (designer) respectively.
Does that just mean that the system that's running Android is not receiving critical updates, however?
Orin did suggest quite a few ways in which the law could be changed to become more reasonable.
> What's really strange is, AFAIK, typing your name in an electronic document is just as legally binding as inserting an image of your handwritten signature, [...]

Which jurisdiction are you talking about?
This is a little something I've been working on which will be launched to the public in the coming months. Request an invite to get earlier access.
> I'll never understand people that want to spend hours configuring their text editor, despite how much more productive they say it makes them.

I have no desires to spend hours configuring my editor, but I need an extensible editor.

> Sublime is perfectly programmable through judicious use of plugins and snippets anyway.

Yes. Sublime qualifies as a programmable editor.
Tag Online Videos with Drag and Drop, then Publish
The same could be said for any binary releases, from open source code or not (e.g. Firefox). If you don't trust Google's binary releases then build your own Chromium from audited sources.
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a debate over what Godwin's law says approaches 1.
> While the terminal app siting on your machine is decades old and has been tested extensively, the browser extension almost certainly has not.

This is running OpenSSH code.
Of course, when they first started censoring CP, plenty went, "Well, yes, it's abhorrent, but what about the slippery slope?", and got shouted down by our government, the press, and peers, who all said words to the effect of "Don't be ridiculous, you're hysterical, what are you, a pedophile?".

Even now, as we gracelessly tumble down the well-greased-incline, they will merrily argue that there is no slippery slope.

As to regulation, there already is, and it actively encourages ISPs to censor.

http://www.mobilebroadbandgroup.com/content-code.pdf
Show HN : Microsoft HelpBridge
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.helpbridge

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/helpbridge/id576543879?ls=1&mt=8

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/helpbridge/f57af950-e37e-403b-b71d-b8856fab2b15
On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without a warrant.

Unintentionally: Deliberately (albeit perhaps inadequately) avoiding purely domestic intercepts and destroying them when found. Subsequent legislation has attempted to make such intercepts even less likely and more transient.

That's a pretty important qualification. Why didn't you mention it? Your phrasing could equally apply to a program targeted at phone calls between California and New York.
Oh right... because putting your critical secret information into a huge, buggy, extensible, unaudited, complex, and constantly changing operating system is so much better!
The break/next/return behavior is not sensible at all. Anybody that comes to ruby with knowledge of other languages with first-class functions will be confused by it, in particular return.

Having said that, once you learn the difference it's not that big a deal.
Worked great for me too. Firefox 20.0a2 on Ubuntu.