skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the OP explains, the knives in question are not illegal and not in violation of Google's policies. Additionally, other vendors selling the same items are not being banned.

I think the "evil" part relates to discriminating against certain vendors instead of treating all vendors equally and consistently.
Firefox is getting better and better now. Great!
But that's a really important issue that I think deserves a lot more than two lines if you really want to convince anyone. For example, let's say I don't think that assumption is valid because adding or changing a feature in a large project is a lot more likely to involve refactoring than in a small project, regardless of how expressive the language is. This would bias your results against languages that are more commonly used in large projects. Maybe that's an issue, maybe not, but as far as I can tell you haven't even considered it (and saying "it probably averages out" isn't a real response.) Without some sort of justification for your assumptions I have a hard time believing your results.
First off, switchblades are legal in some states in the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchblade#United_States).

I can see some logic behind making switchblades illegal. They are easy to conceal both pre and post crime, as well as being low cost. Add to that there is no paperwork (that I'm aware of) to purchase one and you have a virtually untraceable weapon. That is hard to say about assault rifles.
I was referring to displaying files in a separate window, not to file listings.
Google ads in the health sector is tough, we tried advertising a medication/pill management software (for keeping track of times, stock, etc. with a twist), and Google was extremely frustrating in randomly restricting our keywords, and we had to repeatedly assert that we were NOT advertising medications.

They did not ban our account or anything, they were happy to take a few of our dollars :) (we didn't get to the MVP stage, just an embarassingly bad landing page), but traffic was a lot less than I expected (and I can't seem to tweak our ads to stay out of Indian pages, we wanted U.S. only). At least we only paid per clicks.
This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of assuming that there is some intentional malice or favoritism in actions that are the result of an automated system.

- Google adds some terms like "assisted opening knife" and "assist folding knife" so they are recognized as prohibited knife ads. Adding these terms could very well have been automated based on the terms having a strong association with other terms found alongside prohibited items.

- knife-depots' account suddenly contains X% disallowed knife ads, based on the new terms - where X is relatively large percentage. Account automatically disabled.

- Amazon and Walmart also have X% disallowed knife ads, but X is an extremely small percent of their overall number of items. Accounts remain active.

Fortunately, AdWords is one of the few Google properties where you can actually get a human on the phone and have them intervene with the automated results (though it can certainly take a lot of back and forth, in my personal experience).

In a more general sense, this is something that you constantly run in to if you have your automated systems performing any action that a user could view as punitive. I've yet to see a site that was open about automated actions being such - likely because they don't want to make it too easy to automate getting around the automated rules - but it does seem like there is a reasonable amount of explanation of the system that could diffuse these assumptions of persecution.
My new company, our first product
Help make Geary: a beautiful modern open-source email client
Depends on local jurisdiction. For example, in California, both assault weapons and switchblades (over 2 in.) are illegal (to some degree, at least).
Yeah, I'm also porting all of my scraping code to the device itself. It's a bitch, but HN is so ban happy and unreliable that it's becoming a requirement.
Yep. And even then it doesn't take into account the fact that writing tests is more common in some languages (Ruby, for instance) than it is in others.
Teenager Nick D’Aloisio Sells His Mobile Startup To Yahoo For $30 Million
Strongly disagree; I like tea primarily for the tannins, the almost dry taste on the tongue, moderated by the milk. Such a short steep will make a very weak mug.

If you're drinking the tea without milk, I can see preferring something weak.
If it's true that all that non-mystical meditation is, is just forcing yourself to not think about ANYTHING, it makes sense that a person would find it to be a way to stop worrying about things, and just sort of relax.

BUT, it seems like it would be more effective to simply take corrective action (mental or existential) in order to actually address the thing that you are worried about.
since the 2nd Amendment very specifically protects firearms ownership

I've seen folks use that rationale, but the 2A doesn't say "firearms" it says "arms" - presumably "knives, nunchucks, brass knuckles, etc" would fall under that, although that's clearly not how it's been interpreted.
I've visited China through Beijing and Hong Kong numerous times over the last couple years, and without a doubt the best way to do it is through a Visa intermediary such as travisa.com or A Briggs (http://www.abriggs.com). I've used others in the past, but we had an emergency trip about a year ago where one of our fellow travelers needed to go at the last minute (ie, we were leaving on Weds, and they decided to go on the Sunday before), and A Briggs helped us get them a passport and the Chinese Visa, and had it waiting at the airport for our departure. They also have agents you deal with directly.

I'll definitely use them again. The point though, is that for a nominal fee, it's just easier to have someone who does visas every day handle the China situation for you, at least in my experience.
The worst part is that Google controls both the ads and search, and free clicks just happened to be under attack. Obviously Google wants you to advertise and search updates can do that. No one audits them at all despite them essentially controlling online commerce.
Nope, facebook wasn't around yet.
Setting Up An Electronic Task Board
There's nothing specific about firearms in the 2nd is there? Just "the right to keep and bear arms", which describes blades as much as it does guns.
The magic of HTML5 and S3
Tell HN: Will do hands-on boost on Python, in return of Objective-C.
I have free time at the moment (looking for gigs) and i'd like to learn Objective-C.

I'm willing to boost anyone on Python (on Linux, OSX) on what i know (Core Python, Django, virtualenv, Openshift/Heroku/Gondor.io devops, etc), in return of same for Objective-C. Well, or dollars but i'd prefer the 1st.

Hands-on, Skype screen-sharing or other.

Get me at zemanel@zemanel.eu if you're interested.

p.s.: Yep, i'm aware of highly recommend books and etc, i just think it's fun and i like it :-)
Show HN: How I dealt with someone trying to build a copy my business
Someone posted an ad on Craigslist offering to pay $750 to build a copy of my company, Review Trackers. I noticed the ad within a few hours of it being posted and decided to redirect the traffic (since they linked to us in the posting) to our Rails developer job posting with a little note.
Do you have the 'sass-rails' gem in your Gemfile? It's possible to have the asset pipeline work with just the 'sass' gem, but to get the full debug-info that Chrome requires you need to be using 'sass-rails' and specify the config options mentioned in the post.
So, last night I found myself at the hospital at 10:30pm, taking my 8 year old in who was having trouble breathing, and had a 102.6 temperature. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law had one of his teeth break and needed someone to watch his infant daughter while he went to get it repaired at the dentist today.

My wife left to watch his daughter, I stayed home and tended to our kid with soup and antibiotics, and was completely unproductive at work until about Noon when my wife got back. In fact, I was still marginally unproductive due to residual stress from worrying about whether or not our daughter was going to need surgery, die, what have you.

I'm also in the middle of a project that's way behind schedule, migrating from one vendor platform to another. It's behind schedule because of the normal problems one encounters standing up a new environment, learning the quirks, struggling with your sister IT groups to get their pieces right.

And my piece of the puzzle is effectively another day behind, which is not because I am not trying hard enough.

I find the "man up or hit the road" attitude you express pretty damned insulting. Life happens sometimes, and assuming your employees are lying to you, only making excuses for their indifference and laziness, is going to make a very animosity-filled life for you at the office.
Whenever I ban a user from one of my sites for an infraction, he invariably points to several other infracting users and says "well why do they get to post porn (or ads for weapons or whatever) and I don't?"

The reason is because I didn't catch the other users. Or their infraction isn't as bad.

While I feel bad for the knife company, I also know dealing with user-generated content (like these ads) is hard.
What matters more is how much is expressed to you when you have to read your own code again in a year - or when someone else does

-- Python user
Category error? Plants are made of elements; fluoride is an element. If the plant, in its natural environment, binds to a particular element and includes it in its makeup, that does not make it an impurity.
Someone posted an ad on Craigslist offering to pay $750 to build a copy of my company, Review Trackers. I noticed the ad within a few hours of it being posted and decided to redirect the traffic (since they linked to us in the posting) to our Rails developer job posting with a little note.
The Tabata workout programme: harder, faster, fitter, quicker?
The 2nd Amendment protects arms, not firearms specifically. I think a good argument could be made that knives should fall under its protection as well. However I'm not sure if the courts have addressed knives post Heller.
The issue with tall buildings is not absolute altitude, the issue is elevation above the local boundary condition in the atmosphere.
Knives are a lot less lethal than guns.
it should, it blacklists all sites by default to not persist cookies at all beyond having the window open.
I have a friend who spent months in the California court system for having a decorative pair of brass knuckles. These are illegal in California.

Had he had a loaded pistol instead, I believe he would have never have been in the court system at all.
There's enough good data backing up that conclusion that there's no point using crappy data like in the article.

Nobody will argue C is more expressive than Python, but the data in the article doesn't support it. Just because something is true doesn't mean it's okay to support it with shoddy data.

LOC per commit isn't a proxy measurement of the expressiveness of a language. The entire premise of the article is flawed.
Comments can indeed lie to you, but code can also be doing something that was not actually intended.

Having a comment to clarify intent is a saving grace when code looks correct but is doing the wrong thing. At least when a comment is conflicting with the code you know at once that you need to start asking questions...
I knew a person who used to spend $3000+ a day on Adwords who never got much attention from Google (reseller in the cosmetics niche). The only thing he mentioned is that at some point Google assigned him an Adwords account rep. He followed the advice of the account rep and got all the ads and keywords suggested by the rep banned. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

Eventually the person's main account was banned. Last I talked to him he was creating a bunch of fake accounts and running cloaked campaigns. It was much easier for him to be non-compliant on Adwords than compliant.
One thing affects the long term health of others around you. The other thing passes within a few moments.

They are not comparable.
> We’d also been careful to not ever violate Google’s Adwords weapons policy, which prohibits “the promotion of knives, such as butterfly knives, (balisongs) and switchblades.”

Sounds like they were promoting knives, and hence violating the policy.
Why Business Cards Matter
"the number of lines I commit changes more depending on my project (is it simple or complex, for work or for fun?) than on my language."

This amounts to saying: Some days I eat eggs for breakfast, but other days I eat oatmeal for breakfast, so I am totally inconsistent in what I eat from day to day, therefore it would make no sense to include me on a survey about what people in my country eat.

You do understand that a single data point might be useless, but when combined with thousands or millions of other data points, it becomes useful? What you do on any one project does not matter, but what you do, combined with thousands of other developers, all averaged together, starts to get interesting.

If you honestly believed your own premise, then you would expect all the results to be the same -- there would be no variation between Fortran, Java, Javascript, Clojure or Coffeescript, cause, you know, everybody is different and does different stuff, and its all so crazy, how can anybody make sense of it?

But we can make sense of it. All that is needed is a good understanding of probability and a sufficiently large data set.

Mind you, the article above might be total bunk. There might be lots wrong with the dataset. But its not bunk for the reason you give: " the number of lines I commit changes more depending on my project (is it simple or complex, for work or for fun?) than on my language."
There were a few things I noticed:

- You need to be using 'sass-rails', not 'sass', in your Gemfile for config.sass to work. Don't put it in the :assets group, either.

- You must set config.sass.compress = false (or rather, you must not set it to true!)

- You'll probably need to blow away your assets cache (tmp/cache/assets/* or public/assets/*) to see the changes.

I just got it working with a Rails app at work, and I am pleased with the results. Chrome Web Inspector continues to make my life easier!
> We're probably going to have an intern or junior developer move documents from the old folder to the new system.

Just be careful not to give them all of the shit jobs.
5 hours of the existing employees time is super expensive too. If they're investing the time for the full hour interview, they probably think you're worth it. Think of it as them spending like $2000 on you (at least).
From the top comment (to save the scroll-conservative 30 seconds of doubt and confusion):

----

Michael Laccetti says:

Just a quick note that the ‘Experiments’ tab under the developer console will not show up unless you specifically enable it under chrome://flags (Enable Developer Tools experiments)
Trust me, as someone who's run very large advertising campaigns, having someone from Google read your email doesn't mean they'll do anything. They have ridiculous rules for larger advertisers, as well.
"How does anyone think he can later on convince investors, clients, employees and so on, if he can't even get someone to join him and build an MVP."

You might be missing the point made in the post here. One really great way to get someone to join you and build an MVP is by doing the MVP as a pure service first and developing the business that way as far as possible. Then show that progress to developers who you'd like to join you.
I wish Sam provided a little more insight into upside risk, such as maybe how an angel investor could best structure his investments to ensure he gets that one 'outstanding investment'. He basically just stated what upside risk was, which has been discussed multiple times over in this forum.

I think Sam knows the Y Combinator investment strategy is best designed to take advantage of power law distributions and getting the very best investments. With crowdfunding and the JOBS act, being able to spread $10k across 50 different companies seems to open the door for everyone to participate in this type of investment strategy. Thoughts?
NASA / JPL Java Coding Standards [pdf]
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Not sure if you're just trolling, but I'll bite. The government has regulations in place on dangerous weapons, which you are ostensibly free, through the democratic process, to change if they are not to your liking.

Google has decided that legal/illegal is not a sufficient criteria, and made up their own rules about how you can use their service, but then only applied those rules to smaller clients. That is the evil part.

This wouldn't feel so uncomfortable if google wasn't such a big player in the online advertising world.
That's not what we're doing here. What this article really is an examination based on a set of assumptions about how we can measure expressiveness. This is a difficult thing to measure. You could (I assume) do just as well by polling thousands of programmers and asking them in their experience, which languages are expressive. In the case of this article, the measure of expressiveness used seems to match up very well with a) common programmer experience and b) the intentions of language designers. And we're not talking about programmer experience in 2013. This split between Lisp, C, and Fortran is older than I am.

I do not see anyone offering better measures of expressiveness or suggesting counterexamples to invalidate the results. The criticism here is just "Meh, not impressed".
At the risk of being a bit incendiary, I would observe that you can apply that alternate hypothesis across pretty much the entire chart. One could propose that what we see there is something more like "inverse average skill of the developers using this language". JS is an outlier due to the fact that the language's position on the web has a lot of hacks using it. (This is not itself a reflection on the language, but on its position in the world.) It's not perfect (I'd toss Auguas and Puppet out of this entirely as they aren't really programming languages; assembler probably really is a lack of expressiveness, VHDL possibly the same), and I'm not really proposing it as The Answer, but it is an interesting and viable alternate hypothesis.
APL and J would win this handily, but we don't use those languages for a reason.
>>you can get more done with a single line<<

Maybe not if you follow PEP:8 -- maybe so if you write really really long lines ;-)
Yes. It would have been better to publish the chart, and then on this line:

> What conclusions can we draw from this?

...answer the question with "None" and then explain why.

Following that with a deeper analysis of the myriad explanations for this data could have been interesting (e.g. what kinds of projects are strongly correlated with larger commits? How much does that vary by language and age of the project?), but unsupported conclusions are not.
The real measure is features shipped.

It's pretty hard to disambiguate speed of development, fluidity and flexibility (which potentially increases LOC per commit by bundling multiple 'conceptual pieces') with expressiveness (which decreases LOC per commit) in a single LOC per commit metric.

The idea that a single commit corresponds to a 'single conceptual piece' is probably not very precise. It also doesn't measure for the complexity of the conceptual piece. It hasn't been established that the same level of 'conceptual pieces' are tackled across all programming languages per commit.

Just some thoughts. That said, I think though given all the factors involved (more expressive concepts per commit are perhaps tackled in more expressive languages, and that cancels out that less expressive concepts are tackled per commit in less expressive languages -- that balances out simplicity in simpler / less expressive languages can lead to more actual features commited), that actually the methodology kind of works. But, like others here, I wouldn't presume it's quite so simple underneath.
Under no circumstances should rich media be displayed in terminals. I am terrified of progress.
> knives which are clearly intended to be used as weapons

That seems a bit melodramatic. I have one that I keep around for general use around the home. Good for opening boxes, cutting twine/zipties, etc. It's very nice since I can put it in my pocket (unlike a paring knife) and can open it with one hand (unlike a pocket knife). It is a just plain practical design.
Vala and C# are two very similar langauges that are on polar opposite sides of the chart. Why? If I can't answer that in a convincing way, my first thought is going to be "because there is another factor involved in the rankings that wasn't accounted for."
If he is the'boss', he should bring Ted into his office and explain him what is going on and suggest improvements.

If this happens to a co-worker who you are friends with you can freely talk to them about the issue.

In most cases I experienced, I tend to distance my self from people who 'do work with their mouth' and are generally full of shit if I do not manage them. It's up to their superior to recognize those faults.

Good manager/boss should recognize such issues and address them. You don't want half of your team growing desperate and frustrated that a single member is not pulling their weight.
> For Amazon, having attorneys stay up to date on the law in multiple jurisdictions doesn't fit with their operating model.

They already calculate local taxes (city and county taxes too!) for the states in which they choose to tax.
You... copied him back? I don't get it.
I personally think that the poor methodology of this post would never have survived to see the light of day if the conclusions did not match what programmers expect. Conversely the methodological flaws mean that we should be very careful about accepting the data for any conclusion beyond, "Well, it looks like what I expect."
Why would it be absurd?
Do you use a monochrome display? Because, let's face it, black/white is all you need. Or green/white.
As they say, the Cossacks work for the Czar. They have always worked for the Czar.

If a big institution screws you over but has found a clever way of perpetually evading or delegating away vocal blame for that... they're still responsible, unless they're fixing the system in the very-near term. If the resources aren't there to fix the system, that's because they've consciously chosen not to allocate those resources.
As a former user of Frontier, OPML Editor and Radio, I welcome this new outliner =)
The definition of sexist:
".. prejudice or discrimination based on a person's sex. Sexist attitudes may stem from traditional stereotypes of gender roles, and may include the belief that a person of one sex is intrinsically superior to a person of the other."

PAX eliminated booth babes for a couple of reasons: they detracted from the primary objective of the event, they made other women actually working at booths look like they were just there for show - causing men to walk past them (prominent female blogger Violet Blue actually managed to publicly humiliate a woman at an app conference because she was doing a 'bad job' at being a "babe") and they did little to sell the product they were there to promote.

As a female attendee for three years before they instated the rule, the ones I saw were always awkwardly walking around or fiddling with controllers to avoid talking to people. It also made me feel that if I ever wanted to get into game development, this is how my company felt best represented all of my hard work.

It's just all-around bad taste to have female centerpieces at a male-heavy event.