skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This change broke our chrome extension a few weeks ago.
We were able to workaround it using a trick inspired by this blog post: http://brianmayer.com/2012/12/defeating-chromes-content-secu...

Hope it help someone.
How many problems are actually caused by null (in particular, how many billions of dollars?)

While pointers which point into the wrong place for various reasons (off end of array, previously freed memory) cause horrible issues to this day, I can't personally remember ever having a serious issue with a null pointer (they tend to crash quickly and loudly, because in all modern OSes dereferencing NULL segfaults)
I am not following this nearly as much as everyone else, but I can explain why I am interested in it.

_why is more of an artist instead of a programmer, he became popular, wanted to be anonymous (or at least his actions and code be more important than the person) but didn't really hide his identity. Once who he was became semi-popular (an actual name and, I believe, where he worked) he completely deleted his online presence. All of his code, etc. and just disappeared with no mention as to why he did it.

Now he is back and telling a story. I see it as a art project he is doing with his alternate identity. The character of _why is just interesting. First we have no idea why he disappeared, now we have no idea why he is reaching out to us.

In the end he could say "Drink More Ovaltine," disappear again, and I wouldn't be surprised.
Try Akamai's global CDN stats showing similar numbers:

http://www.akamai.com/html/io/io_dataset.html#stat=browser_v...
This is just a sad showing of fear-mongering mob mentality. Sadly, I expected more from these communities.
The rise of Silicon Dad
It means I believe at the very least, a creator was responsible for initial life. I also believe that evolution is either a guided process or that the existing evidence can also point to creation. Do not believe in young earth. Do not believe the creator started it and has not intervened since.
Why not use Recurly, BrainTree or something similar?
While I agree with the general sentiment, no one has been able to build viable alternatives. The ones which have come close are GIMP, Inkscape and Scribus. Maybe contribute code to these projects to make them better? If I recall correctly, GIMP has a shortage of developers.
Too soon since what?
No, not that. This => http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dingle+berry
If you're not a founder it's not your company. Being passionate about someone else's "dream" (often; get rich quick scheme) isn't noble, it's naive. That "equity" you get is almost certainly worthless (what evidence do you have that it's not? "feelings" are not evidence).
10x programmers – 10x more selective
In 2005, what was the variable pricing billing system that we could have used instead?

It's easy to look at Stripe and Braintree today and say 'Ha! Those Fog Creek dummies! They should have used one of these awesome companies with great APIs instead of writing it from scratch.' Guess who existed then? Not Braintree (founded 2007), not Stripe (founded recently). Even authorize.net only did (and still does AFAIK) subscription billing for something like a gym membership where you bill the same amount every month, not variable amounts like we do. Chase Paymentech was the horrible processor you had to use, and their crummy APIs were and still are atrocious. When you opened a merchant account, the bank had to come visit your office to make sure you were real and that you had posted the 'we accept Visa/MC' stickers on the window even though you never even did face to face transactions. It was a different time.

So yeah, today if you are starting a company, don't roll your own. But don't look back on the code you wrote in 2005 to accomplish something that couldn't be accomplished any other way, and wonder why you did it that way. You didn't have any other choice.

The only choice now is, do we stop spending time building better products, and instead rewrite our billing system to work with one of the modern gateways, to get us in the exact same spot we are today? (No.) Do we rewrite our system to take advantage of modern credit card vaults so we don't have to worry about a Linode? (Yes, did that years ago). Cost vs. benefit.
What the future looks like
Almost all jobs where you aren't paid hourly (so basically retail, manufacturing and construction) are exempt. I can't think of a single white-collar job that isn't exempt from the overtime requirement.
Its great to see a large site like GitHub start work on deploying CSP. I don't know how many times I've had to argue with people about bad practices like inline event handlers. With CSP there's a way for a site to prevent them from being used.
The salary increases don't have to keep pace with inflation... they need to keep pace with the interest rate on the $1M which is generally going to be higher than the inflation rate.

Regardless, that's an interesting perspective. My follow up would be "do you think the government is well-informed and future-thinking enough to pick the jobs with 20+ year lifespans?"

Personally, I don't think anyone is. Ten years ago, Microsoft was nearly unbeatable, Google hadn't IPO'd, Facebook didn't exist, and Apple was still a bit player. Ten years from now, who knows what it will look like.

(Granted, that's one field.. but outside of tech, the home construction market was the other boom.)
Tech Industry Doesn't Know Music
I don't have to have a friend that is the same as me. Indeed, that would be boring. I just want a friend to at least be able to understand those facets of me, and not judge me for them. Likewise I wouldn't mind befriending an atheist skateboarder that enjoys yoga and reading russian existentialist literature. I wouldn't even judge his love for kimchi, as long as he doesn't make fun of my watching Clueless.

Basically, a friend finder for "out of the box" people in general. For those who aren't defined by any one thing, and like being around other people who refuse to be categorized.
Gamer banned from Twitch.tv after accusations he faked disability
Well, I believe you need to get medical proof that such a condition exists, which would reqire disclosing the issue to someone.
recurly founded 2009. Braintree founded 2007. When this code had to be written? 2005.
Hey, real quick, all:

We got an overwhelming response to this, which is awesome. Good news/bad news. Bad first: slight delay, while we change up the way we manage the email responses (we're pulling the emails into Mailgun, which is fantastic btw). The good news is we should have everyone squared away by the middle of this afternoon, and should be much more responsive moving forward.

We're really looking forward to watching people run through the challenges. We'll post aggregate stats when everything's done.
I've seen a lot of this over the past two years. I personally have witnessed five guys completely break down.

Hell, we just had a manager who was under a lot of pressure last summer for a huge release. He had a complete breakdown and after four months off, he came back, took a demotion, but he's not the same guy anymore. He used to have a really outgoing personality and loved to talk about his band and music. Now he just nods when you say "hi" to him and keeps to himself.

While I applaud management for working with him and being patient during his recovery, I'm still wondering why other managers didn't raise flags before he went off the cliff.

For me, the larger problem is how do we stop this from happening? How can we stop these situations before people get to a dead end? For some of these people, it's really serious and something you don't ever come back from, which is really, really scary to me.
Ah ok, that changes the tradeoff a bit. Your response was in a thread talking about lack of ownership so I had assumed that was your case as well.
Dark font on dark background. Unreadable.
I don't know about it in terms of money loss, but generally having missed checks caught at compile time rather than having the program crash is a good thing.
Are these really obscure? I've used most of them.
Cool stuff, thanks for the response!
I'm sure if you read my previous comments, it's obvious I'm not an economist, but here goes:

All money has only the intrinsic value of your labor. That's it. Gold, Silver, U.S. Dollars, wooden coffee tokens, they all represent a claim on human labor. There is effectively an infinite supply of gold on earth(unfortunately most is believed to be in the molten core and no one is able to process it of seawater yet), the only reason it's reasonably valuable by itself is the labor input required to harvest it.

At some point, maybe robots will fix themselves and human labor will no longer be required, in which case the whole basis for a money system is going to disappear. However, that hasn't happened, and doesn't look to happen in the near future.

People should keep this in mind when thinking about money. Fluctuations in value in a currency leads to the arbitrage of labor. Currency itself has no value, it only represents value. Backing it with energy or some other resource, still simply links it to how much labor that energy source requires.

So far, there has been no perfect currency, and I doubt there ever will be. Bitcoin may solve some problems, but it doesn't solve all of them, and it's not clear it solves more problems than many other solutions. While some people may get rich from the arbitrage, not everyone can sit around trading 1's and 0's. Someone has to do the labor.

I'll reference Adam Smith again, who's theory was that Late Stage Capitalism would end in the destruction of the Capitalist State when the profits of finance were so high in proportion to the profits of labor, labor ceased. Right now the trading of bitcoins is much more profitable than selling stuff for bitcoins, so bitcoin has pretty much skipped the labor input part and gone straight to finance, so I still don't think it's addressed the main problem with currency, which is that people still think of currency as the value, not the labor it represents.
> they tend to crash quickly and loudly

In some scenarios, this is a serious issue all by itself. My day-to-day work is mostly on Android, and eliminating nullable references altogether would eliminate some crashes, which are highly visible to the user.
The problem isn't just NULL in C. This post is talking about the entire Null/Nil reference problem across all languages that use a null-type value.

This is especially a problem in dynamic languages that sling nils around....like any major modern scripting language. Checking if a value is nil before proceeding is aping what a language like Haskell does when it pattern matches against Maybe (Just a, Nothing) albeit in a post-facto bad way. Granted, you can't really make any assertions about reflecting a maybe value in the type of a language that doesn't care about types before runtime.
Thank you Simone! :-)
Serious question: how has this differed from HN, if at all?

The few times I've been in a political discussion on HN (which is admittedly rare), it's been a crap shoot between a reasonable but clearly left-of-center discussion and "conservatives are the most evil thing imaginable and they clearly lack any intellect."
I'm a cynic. All I can see here is Obama positioning himself to appear to be on the people's side diverting attention from the people's original demand of opposing CISPA in its entirety.

This posturing is just the thin end of the wedge, a mechanism to get CISPA accepted in the people's mind. It's classic car salesman technique; 'what don't you like about the car?'. Once you are in that dialogue it's just a series of checks to tick off before you are buying a car.
There are some advantages to the company firewall blocking style sheets.
Not to mention lost time spent hunting for a hidden nil value.
Professionals, even though they are not perfect, tend to perform better than amateurs most of the time. The few times amateurs get it right, it becomes news because those events are statistically rare.
The foreign policy aspects are just that we give financial aid to countries who then are only allowed to buy our weapons -- in some cases we give aid to our enemies (Pakistan, Egypt) to turn them into dependent friends, or to "sterilize" our air to our actual allies (e.g. Israel). Outside of our top end weapons systems (many of which, like the F-22, we refuse to sell), no one is clamoring for US small arms or other weapons; if we weren't giving them money, they'd be just as happy with Russian or Chinese arms.

They addressed the issue in the second half. But, this is the world of TL;DR.
"Alternate operator tokens" - there are more tokens you can use instead of []{} etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphs_and_trigraphs
I'm really surprised that this post was able to reach the front page with "I'm building another social network". That being said.. here's a startup that's trying to deal with this problem: http://www.joinbunch.com/group/28/startups/1/

Still, I find it unclear if the goal is to meet people online or offline..? Or why I would like to meet someone sharing the same religion/book/movies/job/etc... My startup buddies don't share all the same religions, and my starcraft buddies don't share my startup enthusiast.. but so what?

If the goal is to meet new people sharing your passion, just join the next meetup or events related to that passion..

If the goal is to meet new people online sharing your passion then.. I guess that's an interesting problem to tackle. There are lots of verticals going after this (I.e. finding a fitness buddy). The only difference with yours would be "having all these in the same feed". Is that enough of a value proposition?

A friend of mine created something that could clearly hit that market idea.. still unclear if he wants to go in that direction.
CSP is great stuff. I'm using it to view RSS/Atom posts without having to go through the usual hoop-jumping to sanitize content. Why sanitize content when it's unable to do anything evil in the context of a page?

I would recommend using some kind of test in your scripting to see if it's actually working. I purposely attempt to inject a <script> tag to fiddle with a variable. If it works, I know CSP isn't functional in the browser and avoid the dangerous stuff (rendering user-generated content). Otherwise, it's full speed ahead, detailed here: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/31/csp/
Isn't this solving the wrong problem? Shouldn't IP support packets with multiple addresses?
Ok, what if my analytics disagree with their analytics? That was my point. Every website's needs will be slightly different than others. The point is that someone saying "I don't need to support browser X" doesn't mean that everyone else can stop supporting browser X.
A "workplace" or "employer" can't do that, but a good line manager can, and will. That's why they're valuable - a well managed team is far more productive in the longterm than a team where you just replace the "spent" people with fresh ones.
What Happens When Startup Founders Disagree?
Another Win For Flat Design As FB Gives Its Logo & Other Icons A Flatter Look
If I weren't in a different profession, I'd say we must work for the same company.
We are still waiting too.
The numbers and analysis are interesting, but the article seems to me to have some anti-NRA, pro-gun/arms control bias. I think they're usually fairly neutral.

I predict we'll see another re-hashing of the gun control / second amendment debate here in the comments.

There have been a few submissions lately that make me wonder if Hacker News is headed in the direction of Reddit. I don't mean to pick on yours particularly, the timing was just convenient.
Why? If you want to measure energy, measure energy. The point of currency is something else.

Currency/money is a data-structure for a kind of cooperation algorithm. That is the way to understand it in an informational world. Note that money is not really about being a 'medium of exchange', a 'unit of account', 'store of value' -- those are tautological ways to look at it, they are its particular forms of activity, the real purpose is cooperation (more) generally.

The radical thought is that we do not really want currencies. We want something more information-rich -- something made for our current information tech, rather than originated from cowry shells or whatever. Hardly anyone is thinking in this way though, disappointingly. Yet it is myopia: if you look around non-currency systems are beginning to evolve. What is reputation, or 'karma', are they currency? Not really. What are things like Flattr and Kickstarter, are they markets? Not really.

Start deliberately thinking beyond currency.
As you and a friend found out, the problem with putting that much extra effort (especially in 'concave' work) is that a promotion would usually just remove you from the work pool, leading to the ironic effect that the harder you work, the more likely you will limit your chances of moving up.
What advantages does this have over existing link aggregation implementations?

Edit: one advantage I can think of is you don't have to ask your users to set up a bond0 interface, for example. Any other advantages?
Start-up Placety wants to share your favorite spots
Amazon original pilots are online for free
Facebook Dev Hosts FOSS Facebook Messenger on Git
In comparison to Haskell, null in Java is similar to adding an implicit Maybe a instance for every type a.

In doing so, Java makes it just that much easier to create bottom values when they are not desired (e.g., dereferencing a null pointer).
Techmemes
It's tough making the choice to join a startup while having a kid. I make sure I make lots of time for my daughter whenever I can, but I have lots of late work nights. I try to come home for dinner. I wake up at 4 am to get work done so I don't miss out on evenings.

Also they have a really nice kitchen.
Just wondering what's the difference between this post and the last one where Rendr was already open-sourced? I mean, it was already open sourced for a while. Is there a change log or an adapter to better integrate with other systems? Thanks!
Free for reddit Django & Python course- eCommerce site
This article makes it seem like you'd have to explicitly check whether a Maybe value is Nothing when you use it. This is certainly safe, but it's also very awkward; as a contrived example, adding two numbers would look like this:

case a of
Nothing -> Nothing
Just a -> case b of
Nothing -> Nothing
Just b -> a + b

This is quite a bit of boilerplate hiding the expression that actually matters--a + b! Moreover, whenever you have code that creeps steadily to the right, it means you either messed up or missed an abstraction.

It turns out that this pattern--do a computation if all the values are present, but return Nothing if any of them are Nothing--happens very often. Happily, we can get some nice syntax for Maybe computations like this using do-notation in Haskell or for-comprehensions in Scala:

do a <- a
b <- b
return (a + b)

This is much better! It makes even more sense for more complicated expressions, especially when later results depend on values of earlier ones. However, for a simple example like a + b, it's still quite a bit of boiler plate; we can certainly do better! Here are two alternatives using functions from the Control.Applicative module:

(+) <$> a <*> b
liftA2 (+) a b

The important idea here is that both versions somehow "lift" the (+) function to work over Maybe values. This just means they create a new function with checks for Maybe built in. This is great because it saves all the boilerplate above and nicely abstracts away most of the null checks while preserving safety. But the syntax is still a bit awkward. Happily, if you don't mind using a preprocessor[1], you can get some very nice syntax called "idiom brackets":

(| a + b |)

[1]: https://personal.cis.strath.ac.uk/conor.mcbride/pub/she/

The computation inside the (| and |) is lifted over Maybe, just like the two previous examples. I think this is the clearest option here: it has the least syntactic overhead, and the base expression--a + b--is very easy to read. They also have the advantage of nesting, so you can express a + b + c, where you want a null check for all three variables, as:

(|(|a + b|) + c|)

This isn't perfect, but I think it's still very easy to follow. It might be better if the (| and |) were a single character, something like this:

⦇⦇a + b⦈ + c⦈

However, some people really don't like Unicode symbols in their code :(. Happily, you can have the source look like (|foo|) and have Emacs replace it with ⦇foo⦈ without actually changing the code. It's basically Unicode syntax highlighting. I think this leads to the most readable code so far.

So my main point is that you can abstract out the common case where you check for Nothing and make the whole expression Nothing if any sub-expression is. This saves quite a bit of typing and much more importantly makes the resulting code far easier to read.

Another really cool part is that all these syntax forms and functions are not specific to Maybe--they actually work for a whole bunch of different types. So you would not be bloating your language by including special features just for safely checking nulls; these features are much more general.
Tesla's stock up 42% in one month
April 19 TSLA open: 35.08
May 19 TSLA high (so far): 49.88

Reminds me of bitcoin, but without the volatility.
I've worked with a code base in C++ where the code base would accumulate significant amounts of

if (argumentX == null)
return null;

at the top of function signatures. It was just defensive programming. Maybe argumentX couldn't be null, but it would take time to figure that out (sometimes I did that, though). More code means harder to read and maintain, thus costing dollars.

This would also be contagious: If a piece of code checks if X is null, you'll assume that X can be null, whether or not that's true.

I'd certainly prefer to be able to reason about the code with the safe assumption that certain things cannot be null.
Yes, ultimately each is responsible to himself/herself. But it doesn't help if someone higher up is taking advantage of such people, knowingly. It is nearly the same as taking advantage of people with low self esteem etc. The managers and higher ups needn't help, but at least they can stay away from making the situation worse.
Not only is it unsophisticated, it's also a huge over-generalization. Maybe I should have pointed out I was responding in kind.

Although I would say my opinion on the Democrat party is that it is not run by liberals just as the Republican party is not run by conservatives.

As for the rest, I agree.
The law is capable of taking into account both intent and predictability of outcomes. Dropbox does not intend their site to be used for copyright infringement, whereas MegaUpload encouraged it.
Do they? I don't think there's anything more important for these particular politicians than representing the interests of their constituents.

There's a reason we have police and local authorities in addition to high-level politicians. They handle local politics and issues. If we actually need our state representatives so involved in something like this that they can't perform the functions they were elected for, then that's a systemic problem that should be addressed.

Is this a bit insensitive? Perhaps. But these people have a responsibility to look at the big picture, and if that means ignoring something tragic but not related to their responsibilities, they need to recognize that and act appropriately.
This sounds like the exact opposite of fan death.
> Kneejerk much?

This completely ruins your comment. Please try to keep things friendly.
So I guess I can expect their analysis in the coming days at their own failings?
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