skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is Turing complete. In principle it can do anything.

the program counter is on a separate chip so you can make it as big as your program demands.
Yes and no. They won't let me put a link in and have the cross-connect plug directly into MY switch(es) because a core tenent of "the cloud" is "we reserve the right to move your instance whenever we'd like to" which is anathema to the idea of me controlling my machines, switches, routers, internet access, etc.

The idea of the cloud is that "I just need a box that's SOMEHOW connected to the internet and I don't really care about the details of how precisely" which is fine for a great many use cases.

But there are plenty of use cases where the above assumption does not hold. When it does not hold, using the cloud isn't the no-brainer idea that the author of the article makes it out to be.
His greatest skill was reusing an existing technology, rebranding, marketing, rehashing -call it what you may, but deliver the product in a manner that is flawless.
In Asia's trend-setting cities, iPhone fatigue sets in
Yes, you are right. I wasn't being especially rigorous, and technically correct is the "best kind" of correct. :)
To celebrate this I am going to go buy some expensive electronics from newegg.
It seems unfair somehow that our whole industry benefits from Newegg individually taking on the risk and expense of bringing a patent to litigation and appeal. Maybe more patents would be challenged if there were more cooperative efforts to bust bad patents.
In 2.6.6 also works.
Hacking the election
Off-topic: I had to use Readability[0] to make your blog readable.

[0] http://www.readability.com/shorten
5 Commandments You Should Consider To Be A Successful Person
Never trust anybody who tries to explain statistics using Excel.
Looking at the correlation in students between year to year makes clear what's going on - http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/03/06/analyzing-re...

There's such a high correlation between an individual student's score from one year to the next, and the number of data points is so small, that trying to tweeze out the teacher's contribution in a statistically meaningful way is fairly hopeless.

What I'd like to see are correlates with a teacher's own scores on the tests of the material they're supposed to be teaching (oh you think they all can get perfect scores easily? Hah!) and whether teachers banned from giving homework do any worse, and whether dumping the enforced curriculum in favor of letting students study at their own pace makes any difference. Given how little what the teachers actually do seems to make, it would be logical to at least dump the things which make school dull and unpleasant.
My understanding: In duck typing only the part of the structure/method set accessed is checked at run-time for compatibility, in structural typing everything is checked at compile time (even if those checks follow loose duck-typing rules). To the programer they appear to be the same most of the time.
Uncounted open source projects that end up being run with root privileges are on github. It all depends on how you determine value.

If value is defined as the number of machines that can be backdoored, communications intercepted and so on then it may very well be that that other form of value will be realized in good time as well.
> It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology

Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case.

Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout.

I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.
I wonder whether these interfaces have the same lag as Phonegap/Cordova interfaces....
i) How is unlocking a phone circumventing copyright protection measures?

ii) Most people do not unlock their own phones, but take their phones to a service to be unlocked. Thus, they are breaking a law, but the service is more likely to be breaking the "commercial advantage or private financial gain" clause.
I kind of get what you're saying, but I think there's a lot of hubris in thinking "my profession is special, only good guys (can learn to) do it". Craftsmen have been complaining about the wrong people getting into their trade for as long as there have been crafts.
I am a little surprised we are not hearing the points from this article more often.

Yes, we can learn from failure and so on, nobody is disputing this. The problem however is way too many people are taking a way too permissive and lax attitude towards failure instead of trying to figure out how to succeed. Permitting yourself to fail is the easy way out to avoid doing lots of hard and gritty work. The best learning happens before you actually fail at something, when you figure out you are ON THE PATH to failure and make a course correction to avoid it.

The overall capital formation ecosystem is probably to blame for this lax attitude. When the financiers make the most return from a few biggest winners taking crazy risks they do not care about mean failure outcome in their portfolio.

Remember, people who tell you it is OK to fail are not the ones who will have to live with the consequences of you failing.
Comparing patent trolls to bacteria would be an unforgivable and entirely unwarranted insult to bacteria everywhere. Even the plague bacterium deserves better.

We need to see alot more of this happening - hopefully this will show people there is another way to go, i.e. never ever settle with a patent troll, no matter how scary the alternative may seem to be. 3 patents invalidated but thousands to go. It is disgusting that these trolls managed to collect so much money before their garbage patents were ruled as such.
http://kyleisom.net/blog/2012/10/17/syntax-off/

Syntax highlighting is less common in the Go community since Rob Pike called syntax highlighting juvenile :D https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/hJHCAaiL0so/kG3B...

He also argued against keyword emphasizing: http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/pikestyle.html
And he doesn't even have to define an interface.
at this point, yes, they'd have to be using this too. in the future, though, we were thinking of implementing sharing with unique URLs (like youtube does it with unlisted videos) that don't require login/registration.
From the footer:
> Website by Alexander Lucas Tech

Text links to http://channelsource.org/www.alexlucastech.com (404)
There is a fundamental difference between the loop and the comprehension: the latter is far more declarative.

I completely agree with this, and the wider fundamental point throughout your post.

However, I’m not a fan of comprehension syntax. It often gets noisy even for trivial cases like this one: the letters “number” appear four times in just a single line here, which as it turns out is just as much accidental complexity as using the explicit loop control variable in the imperative version and you’ve lost the visual cues to what each means that the indentation gives with the loop. For more complicated transformations, I find comprehension syntax also scales poorly.

I suspect (though I’ve no hard data to back it up) that comprehension syntax actually isn’t very readable in many cases, and that this may be why some people prefer the kind of code in the imperative example rather than any innate preference for imperative style per se. Personally, I’d prefer to highlight the data flow but using more explicit transformations instead, such as (in a hypothetical functional programming syntax):

evens = filter {_ % 2 == 0} numbers

Python’s own syntax for this isn’t quite as neat as some functional programming languages, IMHO, but I still prefer it to the comprehension:

numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
evens = filter(lambda n: n % 2 == 0, numbers)
Voxel.js creates Minecraft-like games in a browser
Go has really grown on me in the last few months, it's becoming my favourite language, coming from C++.
I think you might be going a little far and taking this a little far... considering the black plague killed between 75 - 200 million people e.g. 30-60% of the population in europe...

I agree patients are bad, but let's not take things out of perspective ...

ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
I did a another post on that one. http://peekaboo-vision.blogspot.de/2013/01/pystruct-more-str...
The post still needs some more detail, though.
"which will be the only authorized way to download and install anything on to windows 8+"

No, you can install any windows application on Windows 8. Windows 8 != Windows Store. The desktop is only click away from the Start Screen (which can be completely removed, if needed, using a free application) and remains as flexible as on Windows 7.

ie. Steam will work fine on windows 8 as on Windows 7.
My understanding of LibreOffice was that it existed as a fork purely as a response to Oracle exerting excessive control over the project. Now that Oracle has relinquished OpenOffice.org, can anyone shed some light on what the stated goals of LibreOffice actually are? How are they distinct from OpenOffice.org?
I can show this in this thread, and I assume the people are not even aware of it that wrote it. There seems to be a common theme that if a person like me is mentally ill, I must be imagining the harassment and bullying, and because I am mentally ill I am not valuable anymore and should be given a lower position and lower salary.

I mean the people who wrote those things don't really mean me any harm, and they are not technically harassing me or bulling me. But they misunderstand that if a person is mentally ill they are a liability, they will do less work, be less productive, they will imagine things and all the stress is in their head, and they have a lessor value than someone who is not mentally ill so they should be demoted for it.

Yes there is a semi-consciously bias here, and over time it grows into a mind-set, and when a group is using group-think they will gang up against such a person using the bias that because he/she is mentally ill, it makes things worse for us, so they have to do whatever they can to get rid of that person.

I cannot hide my mental illness, I don't have the 'passing skill' which is acting like a normal person and blending in. I don't have very much in the way of social skills because the mental illness affects the part of the brain that controls social skills and sometimes I don't get social clues. It is not the same as Asperger's Syndrome but it will make some people think that I have that. The mental illness affects the speech center of my brain and from time to time I mispronounce words accidentally and have a speaking tick that others make fun of. For example for breakfast at a meeting that had bagels and butter I asked "Can you please pass me the butter." but I mispronounced butter only to have a few people mock me saying "Butter, butter, butter" and laughing.

Yes they are like sharks who smell blood.

If I ever do go back to work, it will have to be the right company, with the right people, and the right management that does do things that ones in the past have done. One that does not discriminate against the mentally ill.

Imagine if instead of becoming mentally ill, I became blind instead. "Well Orion because you are blind now, you don't have as much value as a programmer than someone who has sight. So we are going to demote you and lower your salary to a position you will be able to handle." instead of "Orion we will help you by installing software that converts text to speech for your PC and other equipment to get you back into programming."
I can tell you assertively that, if you capture packets while using Google Chrome's address bar for URLs, it does not send the data to Google.
Do people still refer to themselves as "webmasters"?
Unlimited Vacation Time
See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Shared for the details on how this works. Not having this mechanism would be pretty crappy.

See https://github.com/taratatach/FFDoku/blob/erwan/index.html for a third party app that reuses code from shared/ (a sudoku game).
True, but undefined behaviour is undefined behaviour, which is probably what's being triggered here. You can't really expect it to always be "slightly messed up but usable."
Thanks this is a really good interview
it's hard to beat the cost/efficiency ratio of trees
Business Product Responsibilites
What form of evaluations do you believe perform better than VAM, and why?
heresay though. we don't know if he really paid his accountant or webmaster.

This is all very unprofessional.

I think there's a pretty good chance this webdesigner is going to see some blowback in his business after posting incendiary stuff like this.
I'm pretty amazed that the lawyers/consultants somehow came up with the Compuserve Mall as evidence.
After a troll loses, do they have repay all money they gained from others?
"Better to deal with the exceptions up-front"

That may be, but when an application developer is developing, they primarily need to get data into the database. That may be right or wrong[1], but it has a big impact on the adoption of particular database systems or practices.

And it's somewhat irrelevant to this discussion, because there are many ways you can feed the data you want into postgres (like declaring columns BYTEA, TEXT, or HSTORE), no matter how "bad" it is. I would argue that it's much easier to deal with "bad" data in postgres than mysql because you have so much flexibility (e.g. write a function inside of postgres in PL/python to get some meaning out of the ill-specified data; or write some triggers to do post-processing).

[1] I personally think that a misalignment of incentives is responsible for the widespread focus on the ease of writing into a database without considering the utility of the data once it's in there.
Or are you saying that you want to pick who to fire and who to promote based on a metric that we objectively know has only a very weak correlation with reality?

What alternatives do we have? Do you know of a more accurate metric?
This isn't an answer, but you could equally ask the opposite question about what makes OpenOffice.org distinct from LibreOffice, given that LibreOffice was a community-led project before OpenOffice.org was.
Help a startup, that my help your startup?
My friend's son has a good idea (sounds good to me), but no one helps him. Who knows. Maybe this startup, will one day help yours.
Check it out: http://www.aeipalt.webs.com/
They forgot the "http://. It should link to http://www.alexlucastech.com/
The Play mode he brings up at the end sounds like "fail fast" without the structure of figuring out why you failed. There's no control over the failure, just a lot of inputs and hoping you've targeted what's working.

Fail often / fail fast is just the scientific method made iterative.
should be a core feature, otherwise you'll have a chicken/egg scenario (i do a lot of referrals - but most of my business contacts dont, i would need such a tool, they wouldnt)
I have to say, having a good learning material is essential to becoming a good programmer. I learnt to program before everyone had internet connection, and the first programming class I took was so bad, it took me close to 10 years to go back to trying my hand at programming again. The second time round I was very fortunate to have the great resources that the internet provides.
No, unfortunately, and even if they did, they'd just create a new shell company every time they wanted to sue someone.
The title of this article led me to believe it was going to make a certain argument, but went ahead and made a completely different one based upon a strawman. For me, there is a real argument against the whole "failure movement", but it's not this one.

The problem with the startup-meme that failure is to be embraced is that it can cause people to lose sight of the fact that failure is a state you reach only after you make a real, concerted effort and have lots of corroborating evidence that you truly have no product-market fit. It's much more fun to build new projects than to go through the slog to get through the trough of sorrow. This being the case, it's very temping to quickly write off projects that seem to be going nowhere since it's now acceptable to fail, since it drops you back into the exciting mode where you are building stuff again and your imagination is the limit, both for the product and for the prospects of success.

In other words, I think there needs to be a clearer explanation of what "failing fast" really means. It means fail fast, but not too fast. You really need to be sure you're actually in a true failure mode and not just a few bug fixes and enhancements away from exiting a local minima. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out a way to determine if you are in hitting your head against a thick wall or a thin one.

I think this is one reason why it's very important to have very detailed metrics and data, and build in an experimental approach to product development so you can see just how much leverage you have when it comes to making incremental improvements. 10x'ing a 0.001% conversion rate doesn't really get you much, but 10x'ing a 0.1% conversion rate could make the difference between success and failure. Also detailed metrics can help reveal if there are certain breakdowns in your funnels that you would not be aware of if just looking strictly at inputs an outputs. A 0.001% conversion rate may mean that your product has no market, or it might mean you fucked up your Javascript on your credit card submission form. The only way to know is to measure.
The cult of the cloud is great business for me since I specialize in finding VMM and KVM bugs.

Since corporations want to cheap out and host their previously secure physical boxes all on one server with a wide open console and management system to get into this has made pentesting much easier.

I especially like projects like Whonnix, where fools construct this complex layer of virtual machines on top of virtual machines. It's like taking the shit sandwich of blobs and bugs that is x64 architecture and ethernet drivers, and building a whole mountain of shit right on top then calling it secure.

The cloud definitely has some benefits, but if you're handling finance or require serious privacy better shell out for some OpenBSD racks, virtualize the routing table and set up pf firewalls to isolate the network with real actual isolation and not pretend magic isolation. Best of all there's just one operating system, not three of them piled on top of each other.
I guess you stopped after the first four paragraphs. The fifth reads:

"In other words, LibreOffice is becoming more than just an OpenOffice fork, but an independent office suite in its own right. At the same time, OpenOffice has been struggling. OpenOffice makes no bones that "Volunteers [are] needed in all areas"."
Of course there is, I don't do website design or development for the public anymore due to years of dealing with problems like this, so I understand. It's not very professional however, and makes himself look bad. Just disable the site and remove everything you've done if you want the business owner to answer your phone calls.
Building REST APIs with Node.js
Here at Disney we both control our machines, switches, routers, internet access, etc; and we use CloudStack for an internal cloud.

I think your idea of "the cloud" is narrower than mine.
Using LOC to hire or fire programmers ignores important contextual factors, just as using test scores of students to hire or fire teachers ignores important contextual factors. What language is being used? How large is the project? Existing code? Platform? Bug count? Does the person contribute to the team in other ways?

In teacher evaluation you also have critically important contextual factors. What course is being taught? Are the students motivated? What's the classroom like? A lot of ELL kids in the class; does the teacher speak their language?

Many people see some amount of value in these imperfect metrics because they a) seek to measure the critical output (programmers are paid to make code and teachers are paid to make kids learn), and b) simple numeric metrics aren't biased by human fallibility. Popularity amongst peers won't have any impact on LOC or student test scores.

The author feels they shouldn't be used as 33% of the overall evaluation, which is the suggestion made by Gates.

In terms the specific points the author made about Gates' evidence in favor of their suggestion of 33%, I think he's basically right. I haven't read the original study and so I'm assuming for sake of discussion that he's conveying it correctly.

Over saturated scatterplots are not very useful, and in the hands of someone with no training or knowledge of basic statistics they may be dangerous, but they're not wrong. A trained consumer of research, seeing a plot like the author's first, will only be able to conclude that the correlation is not perfect. That rules out only a subset, and a subset that's fairly uncommon outside of the physical sciences, of the possible relationships between two variables. Not very useful, but not misleading unless there's an assumption that the number of data points is relatively small (which may be the case in some research contexts).

Averaging points and then taking the fake aggregated points and plotting those is wrong. It's using a tool to show variability in the wrong way. Averaging hides the variability that is supposed to be shown in a scatterplot. Why not average down to 2 points and draw the line then? Because that's wrong.

I'm thankful that one or two other people here understand, but a bit dismayed at the kneejerk groupthink.
I do version control on my themes. What I ended up doing is having a repo outside the web server and setup a post receive hook that checks out the latest version to the actual public folder.
I think flashcards are popular because they're a good way to prepare the night before the exam.

Language learning schools are popular because they're in fun places with lots of other interesting young people.

Watching a YouTube video kind of sucks the fun out of language learning worse than flashcards do. Not that language learning in and of itself is fun to begin with.
Having a bad teacher to me doesn't matter when any kid can turn on his phone or laptop and watch free MIT lectures

Alternative self-study education is small compensation for having your child literally waste a school year in a teacher's class who has no clue how to keep control of the kids or desire to go over the material in class vs assigning everything for homework. In my daughter's case, her fourth grade teacher was too busy using that vaunted Internet access to check her facebook page.

Also, your "doesn't matter" argument would hold a lot more water if I didn't have to pay significant taxes to support such a lame public education system.
Ask HN: Has a patent you were named on ever been used by patent trolls?
If so, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts at the time of the application, during the litigation, and any general insights you've learned since.
Kudos to Newegg for being steadfast and busting another greedy patent troll.
I have no real knowledge of this situation, but I guarantee they are not using GTK everywhere. Cross platform support (especially with GTK3) is not nearly good enough.
only those who "mastered" the web in 1998
I agree, the whole interview is really well done and worth watching.