skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who feels fairly proficient in CSS and also has experience with desktop application layout stuff (Swing, Qt, XAML mostly) I can say that CSS does feel like a hack. It was conceived as a (more or less) simple stylesheet language for (mostly) textual documents. By now it's used not only to style increasingly-complex document layouts but also application UIs and in that respect it definitely falls short of what other (widget-based) things could achieve for years.

It gets better with some of the CSS3 layouts which more closely mirror what's ben available in the desktop world for ages, but using those is just a recipe for »Your site looks like crap on my browser« mails because they're not standardised yet or not yet widely-implemented (or your target audience uses something else than the bleeding-edge version).
Actually one of my colleagues had the opposite (yet in my opinion equally hilarious) problem with rent-a-coder - the code was much better than he wanted.

He wanted sample vulnerable Java code to use for secure development training. None of us enjoyed writing Java web apps, so this seemed like a cunning plan to get sample (yet custom) code with minimal effort. Hopefully, full of bugs.

He asked for a "task tracker" (IIRC, might have been phone book), and specified Java with "no framework" as the implementation language. He chose the dodgiest bidder he could who looked like they might finish the job. I think he put a few gotchas in the specifications.

Actually, as delivered, the app was solid, and based on JSF2 ;)

What I learned about rent-a-coder:

* There are corporate refugees who do this on the side to make extra money.

* CRUD apps appear to be a sweet spot for rent-a-codering.

* Code quality is hit-and-miss if you're looking for disasters ;)
True, although I think that the DOJ is by far the worst offender when it comes to what most people would describe as ridiculous and even nefarious attempts at legal overreach.
I think using Kotlin[1] or Xtend[2] might be a better option, because the projects explicitly support Android, while Scala and Clojure support are side projects by the community.

[1] http://kotlin.jetbrains.org/

[2] http://www.eclipse.org/xtend/
Let's just have the model pay for the transactions, then?
Nice work.

I am starting to think Google will leave Java language support at Java 6 level, or eventually offer full native support, instead of the half solution that the NDK currently offers.

Looking forward to this year's Google IO to see if there will be any change at that level.
> "Unix/Linux/BSD"

How is that better? BSD is at least as much Unix as OSX.
PhillyETE Presentation: Future of the JVM
Except in this case, the content is created in America by Americans, and the underlying property rights are widely recognized internationally. So yes, if none of those things were true your example might not be a strawman, but as it stands...
This is a misleading statement. Javascript for instance is turning complete even when hosted in the browser. But I cannot write a file to an arbitrary part of disk.
Sounds like you're not being outspoken to me if you're censoring yourself because you know it'll be public.
It can't be called Java unless it passes the TCK. Even so, it only gets a limited trademark license unless you're a paying customer of Oracle. Well fine, without licensing then passing the TCK, you can't call it Java, so what?

Well, since you're foregoing certification, even if you're deriving substantially from the OpenJDK, you're also foregoing the automatic patent grants. And since it's GPLv2, not GPLv3, Oracle or any of the companies who collaborated in the patent licensing scheme, is now free to sue you for billions or trillions.

So no, OpenJDK has a field-of-use restriction in that the only way for a company to build a successful product (or even a failed one) based on it and not get sued into oblivion is to license and pass the TCK to get the license for trademarks and protection for patents.

Here's a link which should prove informative: http://dirkriehle.com/2011/06/30/the-java-ip-story/
What would happen if you went through with it? I bet it wouldn't be too hard to write a program that does it for 90% of cases. Is there a simple case that would be impossible to determine?
Regardless of whether everything that's said is true, it is very clearly written as a persuasive piece rather than a purely informative one. Propaganda doesn't have to contain outright lies.

However, I would certainly take issue with, "The judge ordered an environmental review of the drilling process [fracking] that Texas, North Dakota and other states have safely regulated for years."

There are serious safety and environmental concerns about fracking. These include its significant water usage and the possibility that fracking might be able to trigger major earthquakes. These are both issues that are especially important to California.

Saying that fracking has been "safely regulated" seriously glosses over legitimate concerns that other states have accepted as the cost of the associated economic prosperity
Is it money up front or c.o.d on those sites?
Trying to get my head around why people bid without having a clue what`s entailed
SPDY has no benefit for mobile APIs. Make sure you turn on HTTP Keep-Alive and all your requests will be pipelined over a single TLS connection.
2 wrongs don't make a right. If we choose to ignore a problem that continues to happen because we want to be more PC, it will never stop.
Programming with such functions is called total functional programming. Here's a nice little introduction to the subject[1], and if you're a fan of code and math you should probably check out the other blog entries as well.

[1]: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/07/data-and-codata.html
Except those little POSIX functions that tend to have platform specific or undefined behavior.
Twitter experiencing outage
As of about 15 minutes ago Twitter is experiencing an outage - the website and API loads but aren't serving up any new tweets. From time to time, one seems to squeeze through but then it goes down again.... this hasn't happened in a while.
For a certain subset of problems, it is possible to do this.

For any finite number of clock cycles N, in a Turing-complete language, I can write you a program which terminates but takes longer than N cycles. There is therefore no value of N which will consistently give the correct results in your program.

Turing machines have an infinite tape, so under a Turing machine model, there are infinitely many loop termination conditions, and so it is possible to craft a program which never repeats the same state within N cycles for any N but still terminates.

If your machine is finite state (with no inputs) and s possible states, rather than a Turing machine, you can check if the program halts:

halts s program initialState = do
seenState <- newBooleanArrayOfSize s
setBooleanEntry seenState initialState
halts' initialState
where
halts' state0 =
if state0 == HaltingState
then return True
else
do
seenAlready <- getBooleanEntry seenState state0
if seenAlready
then return False
else
state1 <- nextState program state0
setBooleanEntry seenState state1
halts' state1

In practice, s might be very large (even a 64 bit integer in the state will contribute 2^64 to s) so this algorithm isn't necessarily usable in practice, but it does complete in finite time.
There are pretty much no issues using Scala on Android. After running ProGuard, the Scala library takes up a few dozen kilobytes.

Execution is as fast as Java. I remember running my Scala app on one of the first tablets (Android 2.x) without issues.

The build system support is impressive and there is a whole community which focuses on Scala running on Android.
Open Outcry Bitcoin Exchange to Open in NYC
The first comment on that article brings up a good point, that it was because the song was becoming so famous and popular on Youtube/iTunes that radio stations were forced to play it, it wasn't that this reality was arranged by some key players who're the ultimate deciders on what ends up getting radio airplay and what not:

For those of us deeply established in Seattle hiphop music; we know this post is not "the real story". In fact, it is completely unfactual and more than misleading. Macklemore is an independent artist who, along with Ryan Lewis, earned the Number 1 spot, first on iTunes and then confirmed on Billboard. Radio had no choice but to add the Thrift Shop single - or face being confirmed as an out dated form of music discovery. Major music Industry is no longer the sole means of entry into the fold.
I find it amazing how large format Media tries to explain away how an upstart dared to do this while turning down Diddy, Jay Z and Interscope offers along the way.

Macklemore has worked very hard for years to achieve this feat, and he should be celebrated. Any analysis at this point should be from a place of admiration and not denegration, as the title of this post attempts to do.
It looks like a recruiter, but the other way around :)
When's the last time you wanted a program with fundementally unprovable behavior?

I'm working on one today. I'm analyzing a data set for tens of millions of possible statistical anomalies, and I'm putting my "investigate further" threshold to statistically one in billions. Each thing added increases the size of the search space.

Knowing that it is extremely unlikely to run forever really is good enough. Proving that it won't is a non-issue for me. (Right now it takes several hours to run.)
Oh, the halting problem is easy enough to solve for most cases (people do it informally all the time), just not for the worst cases.

For giving a percentage, you need to specify a distribution of programmes first. E.g. programmes created reading from /dev/random, or programmes downloaded at random from the internet, or something more sensible.
It was more the tone. It was pretty blatantly playing the "real Americans" against the "coastal elites" in a way that can only be called blunt and amateurish.

On a not particularly related note, speaking as a tax-paying Californian who buys gas, The actions of California seem perfectly rational. The oil is finite; once you extract it, all you have is land that costs a bunch of money to clean up. You might as well get as much as possible out of it. Let Texas and the rest of the world sell their gas and oil into the current market; I feel pretty comfortable saying that the price of oil, long term, has quite a lot of upside. Nothing wrong with sitting on an appreciating asset.
OpenBSD Stable packages and binpatches
You can do much of this with Fabric, specifying remote and local hosts. Cool piece of code though.
If you ask spdycheck.org to check a site that doesn't support spdy, and customise that site's Server header to include arbitrary html, spdycheck.org will include that header, verbatim and unescaped, in the page it presents to you (or anyone else who checks that site).

I don't know that it's a security flaw in this context, but it's sloppy.
um? why?
I tried once more to get lambdas working, but at this point, I'm not sure if it's a bug in the JDK as it's still in beta or if it's Android.

Log though for anyone who's less tired and curious:

https://gist.github.com/b0d095fbd1ccd4b28fe8
Thanks! I think I will go with Steve's _Four Steps To The Epiphany_ as it seems what I need right now.
While being able to use significantly cheaper silicon of poorer quality, was the breakthrough as far as I gathered.
Didn't they just shutdown Hawthorne, move everyone in software to Yorktown, and lose a lot of people to Google New York in the process? What's left?
Exactly. The first reason to reply to this kind of request would be to engage with the uneducated client, and make sure that she will pay for that 90%.
I do prefer IDEs to Emacs/vi(m), specially for large codebases.

However for Lisp users, Emacs can be configured to achieve parity with what Lisp Machines used to offer, which is quite nice.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=932
This article makes the prototypical solar energy mistake: thinking efficiency matters. It doesn't (unless you're working on satellites). There is no shortage of rooftop space. There is a shortage of dollars. The only thing that matters with solar is cost (in dollars) per installed watt (in watts). Efficiency plays a part in that; a more efficient cell for the same price is much better! But, a slightly more efficient cell for something much more expensive is not an advance at all.

This finding is technically neat, but I don't see how it is a breakthrough by any means. Admittedly, I only read TFA.
A quick TLDR from the article:

The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in
silicon cells ... [so that] poor quality
silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers.

A 25% improvement to efficiency is a big deal. Getting that improvement with cheap silicon makes this a huge win.

But there's no reference to patents or to research demonstrating these claims, so I don't know what to think.
How difficult is it to tie in native libraries with Scala on Android?
As of Emacs 24, either dynamic or lexical binding is available. Dynamic binding is the default though.
There is network called Freenet just for this purpose.
Mainly because it is impossible for anyone to take your bitcoins without your consent (if you know what you're doing, of course).

It's not like you can place a password on your gold to prevent authorities from seizing it as they have done in the past.
Off the top of my head:

1) Assuming rand(x,y) gives a uniform distribution between x and y:

for (int a = 0; a < INT_MAX; a += rand(-1,1));

2) I can't find the source any more, but someone basically implemented a big int library with bit twiddling to allow for an upper bound on a loop that would finish after the heat-death of the universe, assuming generous CPU specs. Not infinite, but also non-terminating.

3) Anything that makes a system call. You might never get scheduled again!
The breakthrough isn't necessarily in efficiency (the title is misleading), but rather that it is done using low quality silicon which I would suspect means the costs would come down drastically compared to current top-performing cells. There's no mention of expected costs nor comparison with a correlation between current panel efficiency and cost to show that it would have a large impact on the market, so we can't really know.

The article is definitely more hype than substance.
I know Sublime Text has a lot of momentum, especially on this site, but the one main ting which keeps me from adopting Sublime text is that I can't run it from a terminal. Simple as that.

If I'm going to invest time, effort and know-how into something as fundamental as a text-editor, I want to know that I can run it everywhere I need it.

I'm going to guesstimate that I spend at least 20% of my text-editing via terminals, via SSH, via remote sessions somehow. And there I can't use Sublime Text at all.

In those remote sessions I'm probably editing the same things I do locally, so why should I need to change my entire environment to suit that 20% of the same workload? It just doesn't make sense.

Other objections to Sublime text would be that it's not open source. With more and more (new) arm-based platforms popping up left and right, that becomes increasingly important. I want to know that I can take my tools with me to the places I go. Not being open-source severely limits those possibilities.
Of course, back then technology was not as well developed as it is now.
"Australian scientists have found a way of hugely increasing the efficiency of solar panels while substantially reducing their cost."

Did you ignore the part of TFA that was about cost reduction?
People on facebook barely ever have interesting conversation, exactly because of "what are your friends gonna think?".

Part of the reason HN is successful is pseudonymity.
On forums as well as on Facebook, I discuss technology preferences, religion, cultural differences, politics, sports, gender roles, dating, and more. I’m plenty outspoken, Posting in public just makes me try a bit harder not to be a dick.
I recently moved my blog from Jekyll to Pelican and wrote about it [1].

Functionally some of the differences I found are:

* Jekyll output directory structure has a one-to-one correspondence with its input. While Pelican tries to standardize it for you e.g. static files go to one folder.

* Pelican has built in support for theming. Jekyll makes no such distinction between your theme and content.

* Pelican has a much more modular architecture since it can supports multiple inputs like reStructuredText/Markdown and multiple outputs like PDF

Anecdotally, I found Jekyll to be a bit slower than Python for building my blog.

[1]: http://arunrocks.com/moving-blogs-to-pelican/
> fedora is not using the linux foundation bootloader.

I'm very well aware of that. Here is another post from mjg59's blog that you might find enlightening:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/18945.html

Especially the sections "Providing user control over trust" and "Providing user control over signature verification". A highlight for you:

Anything signed with the user's key will then be trusted.

edit: Here is another link detailing the shim bootloader mechanism:

http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/20303.html
Admittedly, my experience on this was running it on now-ancient Android devices before Dalvik had JIT, and ProGuard at the time seemed to always render Scala apps un-runnable, for whatever reason. At least for me at the time, it was questionable. Nowadays, given the amount of work put into it, I'd put some trust in running it in production. But I'd still expect issues to come up now and then, as it's not a natively supported platform.
Congratulations on a very cool historical find.
What I wished someone told me when I was in school
No central authority - well at least until we hit a small technological bump and it becomes mildly annoying - then we will solve the problem with a decree or fiat.
It's not impossible for Google to work out a licensing deal with Oracle, but I'd just as soon expect them to come up with their own LLVM-based language implementation or announce LLVM support for one they've already developed, given that they added Clang (and thus, LLVM) support to NDKv8 in November 2012.
I have to agree.

After over 20 years of very happily using vim and other vi-clones, I'm in the process of making emacs+evil my main editor.

Making the switch is slow and painful for this veteran vim user who has perfected his vim environment, but I can already see that the emacs environment that I build will be superior... eventually.

Plus, I get the joy of scripting my editor in elisp and eventually guile (I hope). No more vimscript for me!

That said, vim is a wonderful editor. Even if vim ultimately isn't as flexible as emacs, it's still incredibly powerful; and there's a lot of cross-fertilization going on between the two editors, with vim users getting inspired by emacs features and packages and writing vim equivalents and vice-versa.
Why not use structural subtyping?
Why iPhone App Screenshots Matter and How to Make Good Ones
CA has off shore reserves - probably true
Requiring fracking to get to those reserves has challenges and has multiple concerns outlined including -- http://www.everettassociates.net/article/3509-new-study-high...

I will say this, CA is a bit more cautious than TX in general, and given the recent fertilizer explosion in TX, I'm ok with more regulation than less.
How do you distinguish between circumstances and the person himself?
A simple example that is hard to determine if it halts is to iterate through a,b,c,n and see if a^n+b^n=c^n. I.e. solve Fermat's last theorem by brute force. (I won't spell out the iteration details.) If your software could determine if this halts or not, it would prove Fermat's last theorem. (Obviously since FLT has been proven, this particular case is known not to halt.)
Anyone with a Masters degree (working as a researcher)?
Would you wear a shirt for 100 days without washing it?
Sounds like you're on the right track! I've found the best way to learn something new is to just dive right in, Do you have a personal project to start off with?

Just a suggestion but you might want to look in to Node.js (a server-side JS environment) instead of PHP, at least at first. That way you can avoid learning PHP and focus on getting those essential JavaScript skills.
You can use the built in 'subl' command to launch Sublime Text 2 from the terminal.

http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html

Editing remote files is as simple as an SFTP mount.
Loops of copper wire just under the lid.
Amazon has a reedition. It is quite straigt forward if you are interested on lathes and mills and in fabricating things in general. Old books are still very useful in that area.
The 80 year old editor that just will not die. Which reminds me I need to fill my lamp with kerosene. Wouldn't wanna adapt to electric powered lighting.
... and a story that will continue to inspire product maniacs for a long long time to come.
50 Things
I believe that if the developer's bid is accepted, the money goes into the 'escrow', which is the main purpose of the site: make sure that the developer does not go unpaid if he did the work.

If the customer is not happy, there are some sorts of resolution processes that I don't know much about.

What surprises me is that the clueless developers also had high 'reputation' (positive customer feedback), which should be at least some indication about their competence.
Many teachers are extremely pro-active about figuring out signs of abuse.

'Many' is quite the weasel-word to use in this context.
"Beware of the Turing tar-pit[1] in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

- Alan Perlis

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_tarpit
Seems to be working fine for me?

Twitter Status: http://status.twitter.com/ doesn't mention anything either.
The worst thing about C++ for UI work is that it offers essentially no introspection and is a nightmare for tools authors. It's good for writing high-performance application kernels but for everyday UI building it's just overly complex and awkward.
Except that Megaupload was not selling duplicated CDs of albums of US musicians or some other obviously infringing activity.

They provided a file hosting service, like Dropbox or Google Drive or Skydrive.

Judge Mooner, I'm pretty sure, doesn't own rights to Sinead O'Connor's music and yet DOJ is not currently suing YouTube because of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t77DexLMjOU

The rules for determining if a file sharing services like YouTube or DropBox or Megaupload violates copyright are not as clear as you seem to imply which is why e.g. Viacom lost it's case against YouTube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Yo...)

It's far from clear that Megaupload violated U.S. law, let alone New Zealand's.
Cool, in that case I'll knock something up.

I'll try and make it realistic from the point of view of including many tasks that people generally want to do.

So I'll have it serve static files, read and write to a database, read a local config, cache stuff in memory, do something on a scheduled task basis, render templates.

Anything else anyone would like to see?

Not sure what I'll make that will require all of that, and I would like to keep it enough of a stub that people could rip out the example and quickly butcher it into whatever they wanted to prototype.

Maybe a code snippets site. I'm off out for the day, my first day off in 60 days, so I'll look at this tomorrow.
That's a XSS then :)
How Airbnb.com actually does things that don’t scale and succeed with a scale
a repost from almost 2 years ago when I started with airbnb
It definitely has a few practical purposes. I have used this for a website for a small magazine. Their issue was that they didn't have resources to design for the web. This was a good solution, wherein they just needed to upload a PDF once an issue was out. And this provides a bit more flexibility from other PDF viewers - organize by articles, add social sharing, commenting per page/article etc. etc.