skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, xcode is such a memory hog that an air is impractical. With 4gb of ram, xcode runs so poorly its not worth it. With 8gb or ram, you can BARELY run xcode, don't bother have anything else open. 16gb is optimal.

I agree that MacPro or MB17 are overkill. A smaller macbook pro or mac mini with an external are good. A basic mac mini is most cost effective for only $550, plus $100 for 16gb. When my macbook pro died, I bought a mac mini and I'm very happy with it.
Thanks right, technically Go supports a structural type system* which is a similar to, but different than duck typing. But the Go community often refers to Go as being duck-typed due as that term is more familiar to people coming from languages like Python.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_type_system
It's also a huge prison sentence to change the IMEI on phones, or be in possession of IMEI changing software in most countries.

Only phones I use are unlocked samsung phones like Nexus S and Galaxy so I can custom build android source I refuse to buy a locked phone anymore
Interesting. If you chose a pin for your card that was the result of modulo arithmetic with some part of the card number (last four digits, for example, but perhaps something more obscure), you would have to write on the card at all.
Basically, I personally take issue with the way Python handles global variables and, until Python 3, completely fails to handle non-local variables.

Let's take a trivial example that would work in JavaScript or Scheme. Often, I want to keep track of how many times a particular function gets called (usually for debugging). I would expect to be able to do something like this:

counter = 0
def foo(bar, baz):
counter += 1
...

This does not work in Python. You could use the global keyword to work around this:

counter = 0
def foo(bar, baz):
global counter
counter += 1
...

This is something of an ugly hack in the language design. Moreover, this falls apart if counter is not in the global scope itself--for example, if foo is defined inside another function. Python 3 introduces the nonlocal keyword to deal with this.

Fundamentally, this problem stems from the fact that Python conflates two fundamentally different operations: defining a variable and mutating it. I personally really like how Scheme handles this: defining and setting are two different actions, and trying to set a variable that has not been defined is an error. This makes the intentions of the programmer much clearer.

A very common pattern in Scheme and JavaScript (as well as other languages I don't use, no doubt) is to use closures to encapsulate state. Thanks to Python's scoping model, this is at best a pain and certainly unnatural.

There are also some minor annoyances. One that gave me problems recently (although it has been fixed in Python 3, I believe), was with list comprehensions:

[i * i for i in range(1, 10)]
print i # gives you 9!
hi bnjd, thanks for giving Frontpage a try.

We're aware of the issues involved with lockscreen apps, it comes with the territory. Old versions of Android are fragmented, and even new versions are often restructured for franchise use - HTC is one company that does this and it is likely the root of the desktop showing periodically on yours. Android is slowly becoming more standardized and this will help, in the meantime we're just doing the best we can.

I'll do my best to address the no-connection failure. Does it completely shut down the app?
Could you be more specific about the text? Is is too small? Wrong color?
Any background suggestions? Its currently a minimum viable product so feel free to toss out what you'd like to see :)

Thanks again for the review.
The final number is 233 deaths.
Great article. As a side note, you might want to consider reformatting the blog post using syntax highlighting to make the code more readable and obvious. Thanks for posting though.
I thought it was more scientific than entrepreneur focused... the competing goals of "science" are to think up a prediction generating falsifiable model, and to break someone else's model. Classic computer science analogy: Nothing get crypto CS more excited than proving some algorithm fails.

Some hard sciences are more open to failure than others. Good luck publishing a negative result chemistry paper, with the unusual exception if the purpose is to disprove someones previous published positive result paper.

Cranking it back to the article, although a "failure based curricula" would be brilliant for teaching history, especially history of sciences, its a complete waste of time for background stuff for average people. Its important for a historian of chemistry to know people used to be really "into" the four elements air water fire and earth, but probably not a good use of limited teaching time to test everyone on it.
After writing this piece and before it went live yesterday, I discovered a really interesting interview between Leo Laporte and Alexis Ohanian where Alexis shared their own co-founder dispute system at early Reddit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjozYFToIM4&t=959s

tl;dr early Reddit used a technique mentioned: defaulting to the person with the most expertise.
Help this Kid make his Startup?
You are missing the connection between these statistics and school HR policy. Sure there is a small positive correlation, but at what cost should we extract this benefit? Given this data, should we use value-add as a major component of teacher evaluations, and ultimately compensation/terminations?

Giving employee evaluations that are 5% performance and 95% random chance is a recipe for an organization that no capable intelligent person would consider for a career.
The author is conflating two different meanings of the word "failure": the act (as in not succeeding at something) and the label (as in being labeled a failure). The whole post is based on this fallacious logic.

The concept of "embracing failure" is precisely about learning that if you fail at something, it doesn't mean you are a failure.
About the upvotes/downvotes: I frequently find your comments to be a little tiring. You frequently repost long comments with lots of links which are merely reposts of comments on a related topic (for instance, your standard "hiring practices" comment). When I see one of your long-winded comments, I always wince a little bit, because sometimes it is a long-winded repost that is not quite relevant to the discussion at hand, and so while it may have some good information, it feels a bit like a hijacking of the thread. I would not be surprised if there were people who started automatically downvoting your comments for that reason.

That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.

One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.

It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.

Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.
What happened to Apple in the last minute of trading Friday?
If you mean one day people will remember the names of programmers in a mythological manner, I doubt it. If you mean there will exist a mythos of programmers. Their persons. Their ideals. Their exploits.

There are books: "Dealers of Lightening", "What the Dormouse Said", "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution"; and beyond them a large amount of information available only online ( textfiles.com is fantastic ). Things like 2600 and phrack. All of the old 'zine releases made by various cracking groups, like "Legion of Doom", where at this point all that remains are various communiques thanking lists of pseudonyms that will likely never be linked to actual names. Older stories, like Mel. The Woz's hacks and Gates' angry letter to early software copiers. The lexical analysis to pin n3td3v as Gobbles Security ( still unconfirmed afaik ). Some of the older bits by related groups, such as phreakers, aren't necessarily programming mythos, but fall into the same crowds and history folders, individuals like Captain Crunch. There are Torvalds and Tanenbaum's humorous exchanges. The first worm. utf8's placemat birth. Larry Wall's idiosyncrasies. Well, all programmers idiosyncrasies. esr. rms. dmr. ken. Anyone else that can be identified by a tla, plus or minus an underscore prefix. Hacker ethic, free software and open source manifestos, deconstructions, apologies, rebellions and dismissals aplenty. Hackers v crackers and demoscene's birth from the latter. Spacewar, nethack, rogue and a thousand MUDs to idle your time away. Many other things that haven't popped off the top of my head.

There won't some day be a mythos such as this. It is here now. And it will only grow further.
Fuse backed by a local filesystem is a different proposition to Fuse backed by a network service. There's nothing about running filesystem code through Fuse that makes it inherently more risky. However, accessing a filesystem over the network does make it unavoidably more likely it will be slow or unreachable, and not just in straightforward ways.
Don't waste any time or money whatsoever on a custom design until you have validated your app idea by getting people to pay you money for it.

Even if you are building an app for hackers / designers who are familiar with Bootstrap and might balk at something being "Bootstrappy", your first customers are going to realize that it's just a beta site.

If you are building for any other market, you may never need to bother customizing your design. Out-of-the-box Bootstrap looks better than 99% of the niche software out there.
It's the Chinese way :)
Lol I don't think you understand what he's trying todo.
There is still a template for SMF stuff ... at least, I don't know how to make a new file from scratch, I have a template and use that ...
Really glad to see this, these costs to pay patent trolls would have been passed along to the consumer in some way.

Good job, Newegg!
TERM strings
I think this is in the right direction. What would be cool is if this could be tied in with the open source repository managers like SourceForge so that soon as I start a SourceForge project, I get tied in with OpenHatch.
Wow, that MC14500B (from 1977) is interesting. It really is a 1-bit microprocessor, with 1 input bit, one register bit, and 1 output bit. It's not a bit-slice processor, intended as a building block for a larger processor, but is designed for really simple industrial logic, such as "turn on pump if inputs A, B, and C are closed". It normally works with input and output latch chips, so you can use more that one input and output, and they get processed one bit at a time. Strangely, the program counter is on a separate chip (MC14516B), which is just a 4-bit binary counter. The application handbook explains how to do addition with the chip - by the time you deal with carries, single-bit addition takes 12 instructions! It's amazing that people actually could do useful things with a one-bit processor.
Not really. The people posting those tweets are mostly trolls waiting for the public opinion to (over)react.
I've always written concisely. Throughout my grade school years, I had a really tough time writing papers that had a page minimum: because I would always say what I needed to say early on - getting right to the point so to speak.

Now, one could argue that my writing was organized poorly, and that's why I said what I needed to say so early, but I don't know. I feel like I get everything out as quickly as possible.
I am not a social media expert, but two points why comparing trending topics in France to the US is very difficult (without any statement on which country is more racist):

1. Twitter is much more mainstream in the US than in France and other European countries. One source I found shows the active users by country [1]. Using those numbers and assuming 320 million population for the US and 65 mil. for France one can see that 7.15% of US americans are active per month while only 3.3% of French are active per month. My interpretation is that the twitter users in France are much less representative than in the US. Also it is much easier for a very small but active community to break into the trending charts.
Another hypothesis which I sadly could not find any numbers for is that the average twitter user in the US is posting MUCH more than the average french. Thus it is much more harder for fringe opinions to rise to the top trending.

2. Trending hashtags don't have to mean people have to endorse it. It could be a critical retweet or other kind of dismissal of racism. So just the fact that a racist hashtag is in the trending topic could also be interpreted as that people in france give a much larger response to racists tweets and try to express their dismay and thus circumstantially also push that hash tag. (I don't want to say that this actually happened)

But just these two points alone show why trending hashtags are a very weak indicator.

[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/twitter-countries-acti...
That's a very clever suggestion.

The only thing is that if you're going to pick the pin you might as well use the secret one.
Whence Complexity? - Michael Nygard -- Clojure Conj 2012
See my comment here [1] why this is an pretty weak argument-

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125902
Censorship in China is a big business, for the companies that have connections to the officials, for the universities that rely on the funds, and for the officials who use this as a stepstone for their career. It is so common that you can even find many fresh graduates who worked for the GFW in the job market.
Sorry don't mean to belabor this point but I think "standard distribution" (changed from standard deviation) is still incorrect. "Standard" referers to standardized parameters (i.e. mean, variance) as in "standard normal" which has a mean of zero and variance of one (and standard deviation of one). Certainly not the case here. Maybe you mean "bivariate normal with positive correlation"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_normal_distributio...

Interesting thing is the (positive) means and variance seem similar which is consistent with underlying random variable being the same.
I agree. The cloud isn't new. VPN's have existed for ever as well as client-mainframe.

The perception that the cloud is somehow re-invented is in fact the saddening thing. It's just more accessible and faster than in the fast, but ultimately you can't manage infrastructure by abdication and farming it out.

There's always an uneasy balance between security and convenience.
I think you could actually do this in C++, but not with runtime polymorphism. I think you should be able to define extractBody and extractTextBody as template functions. If the signatures (return type, name and parameters) of the functions of the interface are identical - and it looks like they are - then this would work as a C++ template function. Behind the scenes, the compiler would generate two different kinds of functions for you, one for each of the types you called it with.

(Please note I'm not saying this would be better, just pointing out that it's possible.)
Manvotional: 4 Rules on How to Make the Most of Life
Isn't duck typing what would let it work without creating that new interface? Do you say it's like duck typing because you don't have to mention anywhere that your two previous interfaces satisfy your new interface?
Ward Cunningham answered “Do wikis have to be ugly? “
So building from source is pretty trivial. Start here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS/...

And we do have nightly builds for the desktop emulator: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/b2g/nightly/latest-mo...

"Expanding device count" requires quite the bit of engineering and working with device manufacturers. If you think it's easier than I claim, here's a starting reference and we accept pull requests: https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/Porting

EDIT: Also to the above point: https://autonome.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/firefox-os-devices...

For now, the emulator works, third party devs in target markets are getting devices, and a developer phone is shipping in February. And we're having hackathons around the world this week: http://news.softpedia.com/news/With-the-First-Firefox-OS-Pho...

What else can Mozilla do to help create excitement? That's a genuine question, not sarcastic.
I (sort of) understand the argument, but it does feel kind of out of place since the specific objective of that page is providing guidance on building UI for a specific mobile platform that is build using a modern browser at its core :/
No, theres more to it.

> Just Like We Haven't Paid Our Webmaster or Accountant!

> and even refuses to respond to phone calls and emails.
Great news. I was surprised to read that in a way similar to the Apple case against Samsung, the judge (in the Apple case, it was the foreman) told the jury to completely ignore the validity of the patents in District Court. It still makes absolutely no sense to me, so if someone could fill me in I would appreciate it.

I read that the judge said jurors would be confused... is this normal in any other type of case? Not a satisfying explanation.
As far as I can tell, the author breaks the universe of teachers into 5% groups and then proceeds to show that the percentile groups are ordinally stable between these two years. In other words, the top scoring group in year 1 beat all other groups in year 2, and so forth, with perhaps some slight shuffling in the absolute middle of the distribution [hard to see on the graph].

This is supposed to be evidence that the correlation is weak??
I just want to add that I recently took the plunge and bought levels 1-5 Rosetta Stone for both Spanish and German. I know there are a lot of criticisms about this system, mostly in terms of cost but I have found it to be a huge improvement over any other self study course. Unless you are able to take off time and go live in the other country I think Rosetta Stone is the best option. I would go so far as to say that it is better than taking a night course at a local community college.

I do think the system has it flaws but it is definitely a big improvement over everything that has come before. I think the future of language learning will resemble Rosetta Stone but that it will use machine learning to be more dynamic and adapt itself to things that you are having trouble with, perhaps it will seem more 'croudsourced'.
Before Rosetta Stone I was making zero progress with German, after one year using a CD/Book approach I was continually forgetting vocabulary, unable to pronounce things, etc, etc.
There is something about Rosetta Stone that is almost like falling into hours of mindless gaming. It never seems too hard to get stuck but it just keeps on pushing what I know little by little.
I think that they should use photoshop to make their pictures more cheaply. Also, the milestone segments seem pretty worthless. Sometimes it would be nice to see the grammar of a practice sentence diagrammed so that I could go and read an analytic description of the grammar point.

For German more than for Spanish I'm finding it helpful to treat the Rosetta Stone as a supplement to other approaches especially as the grammar confuses me a great deal.

So while the program is expensive (I paid $500 for Spanish on disks and $329 for one year of online only access to the German) it is the only thing I have found worth spending money on short of immersion. If you have a 9-5 job then most likely Rosetta Stone will be a good time vs cost trade off. That has been my experience so far.
I posted this on the blog itself, but do you know that Vine was its own company, completely unaffiliated with Twitter, that got acquired in October?

The product itself has been around since at least August, I saw the alpha then.
I don't understand this. What is the deal if they won't pay you?

Edit: Ah! Thanks for the replies. I get it now. :)
This one is good:
http://www.amazon.com/Always-Be-Testing-Complete-Optimizer/d...
I'll tell you this: It's not too soon to tell if it’s the beginning of the end for the Washington Post. Their main reason reason for existence to cover Washington is being taken over by the likes of Politico. They have a good brand, but that's not enough if they want to survive.
The "we won't pay you" text was not part of the original marketing copy. It was added by the webmaster because they didn't pay him.
Wow! Simple but effective. I can't test multi-user right now, but assuming that works I'd love to see this in Google Apps.
Lol hilarious.

The .biz site is cookie cutter bullshit full of buzzwords I wouldn't want to pay for it either but I applaud these guys screwing over their stingy boss anyways. Every web designer I've met has plenty of stories of not being paid or being asked to build a megasite for an insultingly low figure by cheapskate startups
The webmaster/admin whom Channel Source apparently owes money added the "we probably won't pay you" message, presumably to encourage them to make good on their outstanding debts.
question: does this tool (or future product) deliver value if non of my business contacts uses it? or must they use, too - to give me value?
Forced into extinction
This one is good: http://www.amazon.com/Always-Be-Testing-Complete-Optimizer/d...
It appears that his webmaster has updated the website since the owner refuses to pay his bills, and has gone ahead and added in the whole "We won't pay you" part of it" as an "incentive" to pay.
Duck typing: "When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."

Translated to Go: "When I see a type with methods that satisfy this interface, then it implements this interface."
> That was OpenMarket, a software company that originally created these patents before going out of business in 2001.

Whenever exec's talk about needing to file patents for "self defense" I always think of cases like this. I don't know anything about OpenMarket, but I'm guessing they had similar logic. Then they go belly-up and these toxic patents make their way into a trolls portfolio.

No matter the company, IMHO, it's generally best to abstain from any patent fishing expeditions.
Yep, it looks like there is no padding around the widgets yet.