skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the impression that the author doesn't really understand why he's doing what he's doing. The obvious solution in this case is to have addHeader validate its arguments. The reason why you might want to have a separate class that does validation on construction is if you were going to end up validating the string multiple times: then you can just validate once in the constructor, and use the type system to ensure that each header string has been validated at least once.

But is that a realistic concern in this case? The author proposes replacing this:

response.addHeader("Custom-Language",
request.getParameter("lang"));

With this:

response.addHeader(new HttpHeaderName("Custom-Language"),
new HttpHeaderValue(request.getParameter("lang")));

This gives absolutely zero benefits over just doing the authentication in addHeader. Every string is still being validated the same number of times, but now the programmer is less productive and the code is more cluttered because of the added boilerplate.

There might be a slight advantage in saving the constant header name somewhere, and reusing it:

customLanguageHeader = new HttpHeaderName("Custom-Language");
...
response.addHeader(customLanguageHeader,
new HttpHeaderValue(request.getParameter("lang")));

But that's even uglier. What might be nice to have is a way to run the validation at compile time for static strings, so that you can save validation passes at runtime while still being able to use the literal "Custom-Language" at the location of the addHeader call. Automatic casting would also be nice, so that you can just pass the naked string for an HttpHeaderName parameter and the compiler will insert the constructor. But I don't think you can do these things in Java.

For this particular language and this particular problem, it may be best to have the Response object validate all headers while it's being serialized.
A gun with a limited internal magazine is materially different than a clip ready design though.

In the U.S., the legal use of assault rifle has not been particularly confused (it's always meant guns with automatic fire capability), just the sloppy and/or misconstrued use of the term in media and advocacy.

Edit: Second paragraph is wrong, see link down thread.
After working as an analyst for one of these Dumb VCs, this is the first piece I have written that summarizes everything I feel about them adequately. Especially the last snarky remark about the 94% of VCs that read the article.

I genuinely feel like there is an incredible market out there that is waiting to be tapped: No Bullshit VC's. Give entrepreneurs a commitment: Once you get to the stage where they want to meet with you, they meet with you once, have an agreed upon time period for research, and at the end of the time period, they give you a term sheet or a refusal. Extra points if they give straight-forward valuations without the salesmanship bullshit of trying to quantify intangibles like the value of their advice or connections. And extra extra points if they avoid meddling.
Wow, where to begin with biased posts like these?

>A lot of people interested in gun culture have severe inefficiencies in their cognitive abilities.

First off you start off insulting a large group of people, painting broad strokes of assumption. You've already lost the majority of all your credibility (what little you had that is) at this point.

>gun culture represents a small and decreasing minority of Americans

There are more guns in circulation and owned and in the hands of americans than there has ever been in history prior to this date. Practically all your opinions on gun control and gun ownership are false.

I'd tell you to go out and do some ACTUAL research on the subject, but judging by the fact you open your opinion insulting a vast majority of americans for no good reason at all, its falling on deaf ears.

I guess I can finish saying that for ignorant people like you, it would be best if you said nothing at all, you are embarrassing yourself.
That's still a plus versus Will Wright's designs, which were just concepts for possible games. Most Game Design Challenge entries were more theoretical than actual. Rohrer's games are some of the exceptions, in that they actually exist. And the Chain World experience can be approximated--his design inspired other Chain World games.

There's also the argument that the actual game is not the physical board or software but the legend that surrounds the game.
Flexibility resonates heavily with me.

In my current position I have a desk that's in an area that's a bit too social. In a lot of cases social is good for me. It puts me in water-cooler contact with the folks I need to interact with, and I avoid having to send an e-mail which elicits a reply copying the entire org-chart, turning it into a "who can be more formal and professional" contest.

On the other hand, this desk is my desk. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

That doesn't always work.

Sometimes I need to be able to go somewhere and basically disappear into a productivity hole. There's really nowhere to go to do that. I could check out a conference room, but one person stealing a conference room for a workday isn't really going to go over well.

My ideal situation is one where I have a desk or area that's basically mine, and a lot of little corners and holes that I can move around to as needed.
What if your girlfriend's dad decided to run you down in his car--again, running away is dashed. Hopefully she can find a mate who has more spine and isn't cowed so easily by the thought of other humans with possession of means of force.

Seriously, you can either live your life afraid of every damn thing, or accept that while there are dangerous devices out there the odds of ending up on the wrong side of one can be mitigated--unless, you know, you go looking for trouble.

Don't be such a scaredy-cat.
How do you personally define "assault rifle" ?
Speaking of loopholes, I find it amusing that HN has found a way to post articles that are ostensibly "interesting to hackers" which allow them to get into heated mainstream political discussion.

As it turns out, people who don't want to follow the rules, will find a way to not.
Read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

http://nostarch.com/modernweb
I want to make it as hard as possible for crazy people or people on a power trip to be able to fashion machines designed to efficiently kill people like me.

I would worry more about cars, corporations, and governments. :)
The difference between a military assault rifle and a normal gun is the selective fire which allows automatic fire and semi-automatic. In the military, the type of firing that does almost all the killing is semi-automatic, just like a consumer gun. There's really nothing special about an AK-47.
As an Android user, the new Hangouts app that replaced the Talk app feels like one step forward and four steps back (in terms of UX). The one step forward is that the chat windows look prettier. The four steps back, from most annoying to least annoying:

1) Chat windows give me no indication of the presence of the other participant(s) in a conversation. If they sign off, I have no idea they've signed off. They frequently get messages from the tail end of a conversation much later, which is confusing for them.

2) The contact list is in alphabetical order, regardless of their presence. Talk used to separate online contacts from offline ones. This was nice because I have a lot of contacts in my gmail account, and only a dozen or so ever sign in to chat. There's no obvious way to change the sort in Hangouts.

3) The UI is higher latency. If I touch a notification in my tray, I often have to wait upwards of two seconds for the Hangouts app to load. The various screens within the app also take longer to load.

4) I used to have a custom notification set when I received a message. Hangouts replaced it with its own and there's no obvious way to change it back.

I hadn't noticed Hangouts had abandoned XMPP. I find this rather unfortunate. Adium on my Mac still connects fine, but for how long?
I don't believe your statement about "gun patriots" is based on reality. In my experience, gun rights, freedom of speech and freedom of religion are all bound up pretty tightly. A well-armed populace is often seen as a safeguard of those other rights.
Very funny joke
A really good joke. Will show you how to understand if somebody is stupid enough to do something...
> Movies a pretty horrible places to get philosophy across: Dry diatribes and overmuch dialog at times.

Movies are a horrible medium for describing philosophy. Their a great medium for demonstrating the ideas of a philosophy.

People who don't know how to make movies make movies with dry diatribes and overmuch dialog, whether the focus is philosophy or, well, anything else. But that's not a problem with the intersection of philosophy and film, that's a problem with the intersection of film and people who don't know how to make films.
Note as well that, as far as I can tell, he did not build an AK-47. He built a copy of the semi-automatic version that is available to gun enthusiasts. He did not build what your average user of an AK would call an AK: a fully automatic machine gun.
The piece of sheetmetal likely costs $40-50, the parts kit a couple hundred.
Tarsnap has been working really well for us, but one huge downside that we've noticed is how slow it is to restore data from say a 1TB archive.

Sometimes it takes more than 3 hours to restore a customer's 40MB directory.

If we were to have a full HD failure and had to restore the whole 1TB, that would probably take days. Days of downtime for us.

So depending on your situation, this might not be ideal.

I contacted Colin about this a few months ago and he mentioned that he is working on a faster version.
But with 1.5 orders of magnitude difference in the officially known enumerated types we can be pretty sure the officially unknowns don't wildly vary from knowns. Plus the number of rifles used is so small people who track of this sort of thing would likely have an idea if something weird was happening.

My only caveat is bodies found without a recovered bullet; almost all centerfire rifles have greater energies and sectional densities than normally used handguns, so the bullet is more likely to exit. To get a handle on this we'd need breakdowns on where they happened (e.g. city, almost certainly a handgun, rural, a rifle is more likely, if only because of concealment issues). Or talk to coroners, the wounds will be somewhat different.
I was reacting to this:

Guy decides he wants to be a tech entrepreneur. He tells people “he likes building things” because that seems to be a publicly acceptable rationale for building a tech company…but super secretly he just sees starting a tech company as a means to generating an inordinate amount of wealth quickly in a way that’s more enjoyable than playing excel like a keyboard.

I think many or most of us, especially in YC circles, do start a company because we "like building things" -- not literally just that, but it's a part of our motivation or identity to get inherent pleasure from building things. If you don't, though, I see no reason to fake it. It may be cool and trendy to be a maker at heart, but it's certainly no prerequisite for starting a company.

We've really come full circle if we've gone from legitimizing and celebrating hackers and makers as founders to the point where people are posing as them to better fit a script. It sounds like cargo cult entrepreneurship or Zuck mania.
I'm subscribed to http://hackdesign.org/. Haven't had the chance to follow the course itself yet, but it sounds interesting.
We're definitely on the same page. I see a lot of companies frame the choice as binary: open-plan vs. private offices. The most effective methods are usually somewhere in the middle, and depend on the problem & team. Agree that bringing engineers into design/strategy/customer feedback is extremely important and much more effective than just open-plan offices.

When engineering, I personally enjoy spending 11 AM - 4 PM interacting with others and 4 PM - 8 PM locked up in a room working on code. I wish that switching around like that were an option in more offices.
Its actually not illegal... Anyone in the US is allowed to build their own firearm for personal use. They are not allowed to sell it or give it away, if they don't want it they have to destroy it.
I know quite a few who own them for self defense / home defense, as well.
This just looks like it was written by someone who's done some logic programming.
Give it some time. It took a long time for Java and the JVM to be considered 'fast'.
He did not build an AK. He built a copy of the defanged, non-fully-autmatic, "for gun enthusiasts" version of the gun. He did not build a fully automatic machine gun. He built something that is in every way equivalent to a hunting rifle you can buy at a sporting goods store: he built a semi-automatic rifle.
Actually, it's the opposite.

Homebuilt PCs are completely legal everywhere I know. Not including any DRM-related software or hardware does not constitute a crime, as PC has no parts that are mandatory by law.

On the contrary, homebuilt firearms are illegal to create and/or possess in some jurisdictions (but completely legal in others, laws on this matter vary from country to country).
How does it handle the key management necessary to prevent a man-in-the-middle attack?
"All drivers need a license and insurance."

One wonders, why? At least in the case of licenses and insurance, we see folks all the time (anecdotally illegal aliens doing work, though I'm curious how well statistics actually back that supposition up) drive with neither, usually to no ill effect.

Insurance usually doesn't seem to help very much in the case of a totaled car, and mostly just seems to be a captive market for insurance providers. Drivers licenses are more for glorified identification than a seal of approval of your driving prowess--look at the highways near any major city.

And yet, here we are, with millions of firearms owned and honestly not that much death and dismemberment because of it, all without licensing and insurance.

We don't need a compromise--it's a solution in search of a problem.
Looking purely from a design/usability this looks great. I was a bit confused at first that you literally just copy and paste the resulting signature, I was expecting some form of actual html code I can copy.

Also, I wouldn't block out the color boxes. I know the exact color of my logo that I'd like the links to be, but it's very hard to find it just by using the color swatch
Talk is cheap. I never see gun nuts do anything promoting civil rights.

EDIT: I did once meet a militia member at a non-gun civil rights event.
I think it's better to have a culture where engineers naturally feel comfortable leaving their offices.

I worked at a company that had 3:00 tea time, like in academic departments. People drank coffee and played board games, but after half an hour, they were talking about work again and the cross-department communication that was needed would happen organically.

That's a lot better than subjecting engineers to a 24/7 open-plan arrangement that will, after 8 hours at a stretch, wear on a typical person's nerves and health.

I agree with you that 2- or 3-person offices will probably provide enough privacy for most people. Individual offices have their perks, but they do require attention to common spaces and communication to prevent the siloization you talked about.
Good grief -- you don't need to have ADD to find open environments and interruptions distracting! The vast majority of creative workers need quiet! (A few can focus in any situation, but they are the exceptions.)

I find I have to alternate between focused creative work and more interactive work on a timescale of days to weeks. That is, I spend several days to a few weeks (occasionally 2 or 3 months) where I am more isolated from my teammates, and get some specific development task done. Then I spend a roughly equal amout of time in "interrupt-driven" mode, answering questions from teammates and support people, fixing bugs, testing, and generally doing stuff that needs to get done but doesn't require the same level of isolation and concentration. Moving back and forth between these modes lets me do a reasonable job of both kinds of work. (I don't isolate myself totally in the creative stretches, but I let my email back up, for example, responding to only the truly urgent requests.)

The problem managers have is that their work tends to be almost entirely interrupt-driven, and the exceptions take place in meetings. It's all they know. I don't know what to suggest except maybe to ask them to imagine they were writing a book -- what kind of work environment would they need?
Because they can side-step background checks and be resold to anyone.
So the part that makes this guy a derp - he built what could have been a fully legal weapon, except that he didn't install the magazine lock correctly. What is a magazine lock? Its a device that lets politicians pretend that they're "doing something" when in reality it just makes them look stupid.

Mag locks serve no purpose in crime prevention because they don't have some sort of magic anti-criminal switch, they just annoy people trying to obey the law and criminals ignore the law so they don't bother.
Mayer.
off-topic, but aren't you on a voluntary hacker news diet?
Ah, that was you -- I remembered sending an email about snaptime recently but couldn't remember who it was to (and HN user names don't always correlate anyway...)
The first thing I thought of was with all these bridges collapsing there may be a market for a full scale version to be able to drive up to where a bridge used to be and just fly over the gap.
Sure, but you don't know about that because you're not interested in guns. Like, how many people know you can legally build and fly an RC drone from a kit? Or that you can legally build and drive a car from a kit? There are enthusiasts, and there's everyone else. The things you don't know may be interesting to you, but that doesn't make them news.

But, sure, you could see a piece in Vanity Fair about my trip across the country in my hand-build automobile, why not. What we have here is this article coming out in the midst of a huge argument about how to reduce traffic fatalities, noting especially how there is absolutely no oversight over hand-assembled vehicles. (Okay, those have to pass inspection, but leave that aside.) Where hand-assembled vehicles account for roughly no traffic fatalities. Surely you can see how that article in that context is rather disingenuous, to put it charitably.
"People shouldn't have the power to kill other people so easily - not unless they're the police or army."

And why should some some 18yo kid in the army have that right but not a middle aged adult? Because some other army guy yelled at him for a few weeks and gave him a uniform?

You mention a father could go crazy and kill you for sneaking in to screw his daughter, but what if you were a rapist sneaking in to rape his daughter? Might be nice to have way to defend your home in that situation. That being said, I don't believe that assault rifles should be legal though.
You should know that, unless you have a 24/7 guard watch (and maybe not even then), if someone truly wants to kill you, there's nothing stopping them.

I mean, courts will try them afterwards, but that's no consolation to your corpse.

Yes I am aware that the parents example would probably fall under "crimes of passion". The man would still want him dead for more than long enough to make it reality.
> He forwards me headhunter emails all the time that are addressed to variations of my first and last name.

Sure he's not trying to tell you something? :-|
The question is, how likely are you to end up with a rifle pointed at you? Not very.
60 fatal gun accidents per day? Way way off. It's measured in the low hundreds per year, not around 21,000 annual.

Cars however...30,000ish accidental per year. (USA numbers)
Her reaction seems a bit too emotional.
definitely ture,
an environment which provide more freedom & privacy, will get more feedback, and make the worker happier.
Resources to rev up your creative writing mind
I ran an A/B test with Clicky Analytics and the results were astounding. I have a 70% bounce rate with Google Analytics and a 20% bounce rate with Clicky.

Word on the street is that Google Analytics is most certainly not designed for you - the website owner. It's designed for them to track what is useful to Google, which is why it's free. We all know Google makes bank on our data, so it's just another way to compile data without offering much service.

I suggest also installing Clicky Analytics and comparing. Would be interesting to hear results from other people
Wrong. Do more more research.
Where does "restaurant" come from? Can conspiracies not be planned in a private residence etc.?

Even with a restaurant, you're relying on someone present giving evidence to law enforcement. That works just the same with encryption -- if you have an encrypted chat room with five people and one of the participants sends the logs to the FBI (or is an undercover agent), the FBI will have the logs. If no one does, the FBI will not, which is the same as it is when co-conspirators meet in a restaurant.

>That means robust protections against warrantless wiretaps, but also an effective way of getting access to information pursuant to court-authorized warrants.

The FBI has plenty of tools available. Even if data is encrypted, law enforcement agents with a warrant would still be able to obtain information from ISPs as to who is communicating and when. In the most serious cases trotted out to justify new powers, the FBI can install a listening device or put a trojan on the suspect's communications device.

The way to strike the right balance here is to make wiretapping extremely technologically difficult but not impossible. That makes it very hard for criminals or anyone without government-level resources, and makes it very difficult for governments to engage in unjustifiable dragnet surveillance of innocent people, while still allowing governments to capture the communications of suspects in the rare and most serious cases where the existing evidence justifies that extraordinary level of invasion into the private communications of citizens.
Until the next element in the pipeline chain decodes it and you can then have injection.
Hunting rifles with magazines are quite common. However, you do zero in on the effective difference between supposed "assault rifles" and semi-automatic hunting rifles: the magazine / number of rounds available.

I think this is an important point, because when you cut through the furor, that really is the only effective distinction. And it's a heck of a lot more minor a distinction than the more common blending of "fully automatic machine gun" with a semi-auto rifle that merely looks bad ass, is covered with Tactical Stuff (TM), and uses a composite stock instead of wood.
What do you call it when you do a good job of achieving a poor goal? "Evil" might not be too far off, although the FBI doesn't have too much of a choice in this matter.

The resources spent on combating terrorism are vastly disproportionate to the threat presented. The FBI may see this as the best way to combat terrorism, but it's an unworthy goal, and it's bad for them to potentially cause so much damage in pursuit of it.

Maybe another alternative should be presented: "solving the wrong problem."
Get good or get beaten: in praise of brutally hard games