skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, most of the math in this part of the quiz is not what I've found the most relevant: it might be applicable to your domain, but not to programming in general. You can get quite far without dealing with any sorts of numbers except maybe natural numbers.

On the other hand, it didn't go into things that really are applicable to all programming, like formal logic, type theory and semantics.

For example, I think it is very easy to overstate the importance of calculus in programming. There are very many interesting applications that don't require any calculus at all. My primary interest is in programming languages, and we like to pretend that real numbers don't even exist most of the time :P.

On the other hand, formal logic and semantics is useful for reasoning about any type of programming. You don't even have to be entirely formal about it: just having a basic idea of how you could formally reason about a program helps you be clearly in entirely informal ways! For example, I've found that designing clear, easy to use libraries is far easier if you just consider the denotational semantics of your constructs completely informally: it makes it much simpler to think about the meaning of your code divorced from its implementation and makes the API and documentation much clearer.

Similarly, knowing a bit about axiomatic semantics helps you deal with things like loop invariants. Sure, you'll probably never have to prove any properties about your code in great detail. However, just being aware of these ideas helps you write the code in clearer ways and maybe even write better tests.

Type theory is also broadly underrated. Even in a language like Java, you have the same considerations--you still have to worry about covariance and contravariance, for example. Being aware of the simple and elegant models that are usually used for type systems can help you navigate Java's jumbled mess of inheritance and generics.

Anyhow: math is useful for all programming, just not necessarily the math in this quiz.
I always lose my data connection because of this. I then have to go into options and select my network manually. Seems like if I do that it connects me to a stronger connection.
First off, I don't care about IE because I don't use it. Second, how's it way better ?
Those little boxes are all boxes there are (except for prolog).

BTW, downvotes are as meaningless as i--.
I'm in south Denver and would like to attend.
With MySQL it's not necessarily always a good thing to persist connections. If your script dies, you lost that connection as a resource until it's killed for being idle.

Most DBs all have their own connection pooling mechanisms that don't work the same way, so we need to look into each to see if it's worth it. Caching though (query as well as HTML), is usually always a good idea.
Just to clarify, you think that there is no "climat change" a.k.a. "global warming"?
> testing
> this
out
From the linked article:

"Dunbar claims she's a "big fan" of Thomas Jefferson, but thinks a "secular humanistic ideology" has clouded current interpretations of his work. So she cuts him out of the standards on the Enlightenment and its influence on the US' founding documents, instead substituting in pre-enlightenment figures like Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin."

From droithomme's comment:

"When this story first came out last year claiming that Thomas Jefferson was removed from the curriculum because he was an atheist (which he was not), I went and looked at the actual differences made to the state standards so I could have a laugh. [...]"

They seem pretty related to me.
This made me laugh, good post!
The HN effect is enough to take down even the mightiest of servers lol, avoid shared hosting if you plan to make the front page, I'm curious what the article reads like but I can't get to it...the suspense is killing me
Are you saying a gay man can't be a man?

Because, that's not what I said.
V3Solar Spin Cell = 8 Cents/kWh?
We know that there are more people willing to pay between $300 and $350 than Google/LG produced. We just don't know how many phones Google/LG has produced. If the supply of Nexus 4's were anywhere similar to the number of Samsung Galaxy S2's or S3's, then I would strongly agree with you.
"You might then ask why in the USA is this being left to a search company?"

Because of the liability involved in the American legal environment.

I've long suspected that Europe, Japan, or Korea will beat the US to commercially viable driverless cars.
"PHP strives to maintain backwards compatibility", I'll have to say I've seen enough evidence to the contrary. Even basic object-oriented metaprogramming have been radically changed in minor point/patch releases. Stuff like "get_class_vars()" changing from returning private vars, to not returning private vars, etc. (edit: between PHP v5.2.6 and v5.2.7 if I remember correctly)
I was writing some networking code for an avionics project in C, and stumbled upon a bug in GCC that was causing structures to be packed incorrectly in memory. The bug had long been fixed in newer versions of GCC, but it's so time-consuming and money-consuming to approve new compilers for avionics use that we just had to work around the bug.

If upgrading from one version of GCC to another is a big deal, I can only imagine how excited avionics stakeholders wouldn't be to switch compilers altogether.

It may happen eventually, but then again... it may not. Just so long as they are happy to use some GCC build from 2002 or whatever, and just so long as there's no pressing need to use something else, why should they take on the effort and expense of switching?
LOL, that's insanity wolf territory. I'm not sure if I can handle that.
http://www.chefday.com/ is Heroku for cooking :)
x264 isn't remotely free to you. If you use that encoded video in any business capacity at all that doesn't meet the "free internet content for end users" definition, you're going to hear from them MPEG-LA lawyers about licensing.

Are you sure you're not scaremongering just a bit here?

For one thing, the royalties typically don't kick in until projects have reached a significant size. Using H.264 is explicitly free up to that point for those users, even if you accept the validity of the patents etc.

Moreover, it seems unlikely that lawyers would trouble a lot of small companies anyway, at least in places like Europe. Firstly, they'd have to notice them. Secondly, they'd have to know that the use wasn't properly authorised (since bringing a groundless lawsuit in a loser-pays system can be expensive -- you don't see the equivalent of the xxAA shakedowns over here for similar reasons). Thirdly, are heavyweight industry lawyers really going to risk a legal action that could set a precedent that these patents are unenforceable, destroying their entire business model across an entire continent, just to extract a modest amount of licensing fees from a small business? If they wanted to pick that fight, I suspect the unlucky business having to defend itself would suddenly find itself with a lot of well-financed friends.
Although it looks like the DNS is pointing to AWS...how did it go down?
S̶l̶a̶s̶h̶d̶o̶t̶Hacker News: News for nerds
> The web is for large quantities of stuff, with low signal to noise; desktop apps are for focusing

Interesting point, noted!

> YouTube does have a native iOS app, which I find to be much better [..] on my iPad

Yup, hence my spelling out that there's no native desktop app. With mobile apps we have a few confounding factors:

* less-powerful processors that may be unacceptably slowed down by the HTML/JS layer

* immaturity of multitouch and notification APIs in JavaScript

* limited (if any?) support for putting pure web apps on your home screen, or in an app store

As the APIs mature and tablet and smartphone processors get faster, I expect there to be fewer and fewer reasons to do fully-native apps. But yes, of course, they do offer a better experience today.
That graph is incredibly misleading. It goes from $5000 segments to a $50000 segment—which the author has the nerve to label a discontinuity!

That's not to say income inequality isn't a problem, but misleading charts are the wrong way to make an argument.
> @philsturgeon: When you click Terminate instead of Reboot bad things happen.
For me, it would be having released at least one function which provided some use or was an example of something people struggle with, E.G. Best practices in your language.

Personally, I have never opened a Github account, but if I had to I would include a useful 120 line PHP function which abstracts away the standard PHP FTP functions and lets you use it in a much more human way:

$result = advancedExtractor("ftp.example.com", "localUsername", "localPassword", array(

"upload" => array("localFile" => "/www/var/mylocalserver/public_html/mylocalfile.php", "remoteFile" => "/www/var/theremoteserver/public_html/theremotefile.php"),

"download" => array("localFile" => "/www/var/mylocalserver/public_html/mylocalfile.php", "remoteFile" => "/www/var/theremoteserver/public_html/theremotefile.php"),

"delete" => array("remoteFile" => "/www/var/theremoteserver/public_html/theremotefile.php","backup" => "no")
));

Not only does this make it quicker and easier for me to FTP files, it allows me to zip and unzip files locally and remotely, easily collect errors from the FTP at every stage (an array is returned at the end with simple status codes, 0 for unable to connect, 1 for connected and done properly, 2 for connected and there was an error.)

But this is off topic, simple put, anything which any other person would find useful would be an acceptable submission.
especially nasty is magic_quotes , switch your old website to a new webhost (or have your existing one upgrade their PHP installation) and you get instant SQLi vulnerabilities.
Defacing a website from behind who knows how many layers of anonymizing proxies isn't being black and sitting at the front of a segregated bus, either.
It's a joke, patterned off the famous "Estimate how many golf balls fit in a schoolbus" interview questions that are just windows into how candidates would think about such things. (They're terrible questions for engineers. Don't ask them.)

The dual purpose of the joke is that, if you played it straight, you'd probably come up with a number in or near the millions, which I am suggesting is a reasonably achievable result from comparatively trivial optimization work applied at scale. (That's sort of a thing for me.)
Personally, I believe his death, sorry life, is way more important than any startup or ideas we have had here. It is the very nature of who we are and what we lost. Martyr.
Aha, just checked his twitter feed
Now it's 404.
'prop up'? I don't follow your reasoning, GCC does not exist for Linux.

As for Linux relying on GCC, Linux relies on lots of GCC compiler extensions, many extensions which exists as a direct result of requests from kernel developers.

You need to patch both Linux and Clang/LLVM to be able to even compile Linux with Clang/LLVM, and the result is unstable, so it's not as if Linux is a 'holdout' by any measure.
The Independent Lens blog mentions some (IMO) key points that are left out of the Ars piece:

1. "In 2011, the Texas Legislature shifted authority to order textbooks from the state to individual school districts with Senate Bill 6. The law deprived the board of its final say-so."

2. "Now, [textbook publishers] only have to meet 50 percent of the standards…Textbook publishers have a little more wiggle room."

Those details seem quite important for giving context to the TEA members' attempted or realized changes to the curriculum in terms of what actually threatens education vs. what ultimately comes down to grandstanding.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/revising-the-revisio...
Because democracy.

Not coincidentally, religious influence in government is one of the factors that has been slowly leading me to question the merits of democracy in general.
If you relied on magic_quotes for security, you deserve it.
Can you recommend a good person/group/source for great design?. I think these guys Zeldman, Santamaria, etc, rather than innovators are good decision makers in terms of where to place things on a page. Because it seems to be working for everybody, and they proved it.
What else do you propose they should be using?
Thanks for that, will check this out!
I spent a while looking for the paperclips. They are nothing new. I remember seeing them some 20 years ago. But the various sites I found mostly sold Gems, some sold Gothic, and the rest were decorative styles. I even went through the old patent literature looking for it, but the closest I found was pre-Gem, from around 1900.

I did find a picture of what I'm thinking of, in the logo for http://www.bureaudirect.co.uk/ .

Still, I don't think you want an extended Gem. Try a Gothic - it has longer legs and is supposed to be favored by archivists, who are more affected by the problem you mentioned - but I haven't yet found an online source for them. Or perhaps an owl paperclip, since that doesn't look like it has anything which will catch the paper and several places stock it.
The PDF says March of 2000, but it was probably around for decades beforehand :)
I think your point "same job offers, the same salary? Probably not" i think you just made my point.

And I seem to recall the German education system has some quite strict streaming. I think going from apprentice-> ->technician->engineer (or similar level of job) might be harder in Germany than it is in the UK or US.

Having said that Germany has a very powerfull vocational training system unlike any where else in the world.
Or he could just buy a premade one (when they're back in stock)

http://cargocollective.com/4thamendment
It's a recurring theme - "we need to rewrite PHP and I know exactly how to do it and PHP maintainers are idiots for not doing it years ago. Oh, btw, I don't know C and have no idea how PHP internals look like, but how hard could it be?" Happens all the time.
Thanks, looks interesting, I'll check that out.
JJ Abrams confirmed as director of next Star Wars film
Am I supposed to be able to vote multiple times? My incessant clicking has now made "The Ambiance" the number 1 reason for going to Y Combinator.
So I'm assuming you're of native ancestry in your particular region.
Another example (this time a private e-mail thread that was made public) is this one, which later became a massive discussion on the FreeBSD advocacy mailing list. Here, as a University project, someone wrote a backend for gcc that generated Java bytecodes (not like gcj, which bypasses most of gcc itself, but a true backend that could generate bytecodes from arbitrary front-ends, such as C).

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-02/msg00895.html

In this case, Stallman not only indicated that the code should not be accepted, but even requested that the code that had already been published be retracted. He felt that Java bytecodes were sufficiently high-level that they could be used as an intermediate language, allowing closed-source backends to be indirectly connected to gcc's frontends.

FWIW, here again, it isn't clear whether going to RMS was even the right path; it could be that addressing the gcc mailing list in the first place would have caused a different discussion. In fact, even once posted to the gcc mailing list, the response was actually largely positive, although now somewhat colored into a discussion of the e-mail thread, and not the patch; I am not certain (but would love to know) why this patch then continued to not happen.
Oh FFS with the sexism police in HN
The error is that there are too many connections, not that it took too long to establish them. MySQL is generally pretty quick about establishing connections (although you can have issues w/ reverse DNS taking forever; it's best to turn that off and do access control by ips).

Ideally, a blog can be cached to static html (regen pages when owner adds an entry and if comments are self hosted, regen when a comment is added/approved). Even so, it looks like there are too many php processes running compared to mysql connections allowed; lowering the php processes will probably lead to better throughput than ramping up mysql connections.
In my defence, it wasn't my code but I was hosting it.
Getting 3 angry "why does my website have porn all over it" calls in one day isn't fun.
You can also patent improvements. Since no one knows the details, you can't be sure that there is no prior art. What if the patent is on the specific way the dustbin is attached to the handle?

You need only review the barbed wire or paperclip patents to see how seemingly small differences can be patented.
I see, so the use case here is real time messaging and chat? Like if there's a lot of people in a given area they care fire this up and talk? That sounds pretty awesome. We were going more for a slowly propagating P2P effect that might take days for a message to reach someone farther away, but I like the sound of what you've got there too.
Who said anything about it having virtually zero traffic? It has a lot of traffic actually.

The stuff sold in flippa in my experience are small niche websites,whereas this is a big opportunity for the right team. Maybe I havent spent enough time on flippa!
"This is less a persecution than it is a lack of understanding imo."

The same could be said of the sentiment that AIDs is "God's way of punishing homosexuals"... The people "throwing the book" at geeks are coming from the same place, as you have said (lack of understanding), IMHO as the Westboro Baptist's who I would consider "persecutive" of homosexuals.

"I am saying is that the sort of crime that Aaron Swartz was accused of is not the same sort of crime that defacing a government website is."

"if someone were to say that going after the guys who hit the ussc.gov site is persecution? That's not persecution."

I felt that way a few years ago watching the start of the hactivism stuff, and I would have said it was pretty cut-and-dry vandalism then. Today I find it harder to view this as strictly vandalism in light of the larger developing context, only the most recent of which is Aaron Swartz killing himself (to name, sadly, even only the latest suicide); Aaron's case in particular stands out to me as walking the line between vandalism, copyright infringement, and information/civil rights activism, blurring the distinction (to me at least). The lack of understanding, as you put it, touches all these categories and when I compare the mandatory minimums in the CFAA to the lack of interest in banking and financial crimes, for example, it feels a lot like persecution, even if it's also (in part) vandalism.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, just following my train of thought all the way to the station...
So if you terminate an instance on AWS you automatically lose your data? How does that work? I've never used AWS, I usually self host or use 1and1 VPS
Thanks for the response! I ask because I have an idea for a CLI program, and I want to write it in Clojure, but I'm worried about the startup time of the JVM. As I understand it, this issue is mitigated in Drake by the fact that a typical job will crunch lots of data and therefore take lots of time. That's not the case for my program, it needs to be quick.
I'm not saying this is what you should do, but it's probably what I would do if my college went under:

Put on my resume that I graduated. From a school that was good, not the shitty one that went out of business.

Actually, as someone who didn't graduate, I find that just not mentioning whether or not I graduated works fine. I just say 'University of X, 200X - 200X, Mathematics' on my resume. At this point in my career it doesn't matter, and back when it might have mattered almost nobody has the balls to say to you "I see that you attended University of X for n years, did you graduate?".
I am sick of hearing about Anonymous and its vigilantism. We have courts and a justice system for a reason: to place retaliatory force under objective controls (laws) so that the rights of individuals are not violated. Their tactics are both dangerous to freedom and to justice.

In addition, while a few of the things they're against are actually bad things, not all of the causes they fight are just. And their illegal methods serve mainly to hurt the good fights (such as the fight against Scientology) rather than help.
There is a wide gulf between "thinking that there is no climate change" and agreeing with the politicization of the issue at every opportunity by authors, actors, and journalists who often are not particularly well-informed on the subject.

Your comment's actually a pretty good illustration of the effect the grandparent is (probably) talking about.
Schizophrenia destroyed my first startup- It began & went undiagnosed while I was starting it, and it kept getting worse until the delusions affected my decisions and eventually activities related to them took priority over writing my business plan and securing funding. The venture ultimately failed because of its affect on me, and I lost the entire 6-figure inheritence I had invested in the venture.

Now after being hospitalized for it, and having found medication which makes it so that it's like I'm not sick at all, I can attempt to learn how to code, and hope to try again doing that once I learn how.
Raising awareness. :)
Although true, I would say that's kind of an "abuse". I find many PHP functions have changed over versions to give more predictable output and validate expected input more stringently. If backwards compatibility wasn't a concern, they would attempt to standardize the lib in obvious incompatible ways.
I'm genuinely curious what you mean by "almost every way".

I use the Gmail web interface daily because its keyboard shortcuts for labeling, archiving, and deleting are unbeatable for triaging my inbox, but it pales in comparison to Outlook 2007, 2010, and 2013 for composing and scheduling (and I schedule against an Apps for Business account, not Exchange). In particular, pinning search folders like "Unread Mail" to the "favorites" area is invaluable to me because I filter a lot of my mail with "skip inbox" and "keep unread" so lower priority mail doesn't clutter my inbox or distract me with push alerts, but I want easy access to it later. I've tried using g + l "unread" in the Gmail web interface to replace that, many times, but the experience is just so much worse that I don't find it usable at all.
I can't view that article because it's down, but I assume this is some sort of "PHP internals suck" rant.

I'm surprised there isn't something like JPHP yet to run PHP on the JVM.
In this case, it captures and streams from the computer it is running on via a video capture card. The application is for archiving audio and video from an external box that it monitors.

The nice thing about doing it that way, is that adding the capability to stream real-time from the external box that is being monitored is as easy as opening the ports to external access.
Now that it is (ostensibly) appropriate for web sites to ask for photo IDs, that opens up new opportunities for phishing and identity theft.
Ah, that didn't cross my mind. Thanks
ICC is a proprietary compiler which not only focuses it's optimizations on their own cpu range but also have a history of deliberately generating subpar codepaths for non-Intel cpu's.

MVSC is Windows only proprietary compiler and certainly hasn't had stellar C++ standard support although they are trying to rectify that with their recent 'Go native' push.

I have had no experience with IBM's XLCC compilers though, maybe someone else has?
The Malthusian fear of overpopulation is unfounded. Most demographers expect the world population to peak between 2040 and 2050 and then begin declining.

This isn't a particularly new idea, although recently it's been popularized with articles like this:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/11/overcrowding-nah-the-wor...

We are doing just fine limiting population growth without any difficult choices, and so is the rest of the world. Even birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa have been dropping like a stone.
Wireless "Deauth" Attack using Aireplay-ng, Python, and Scapy