skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that the definition of a "scientific" experiment should include harmless fun that leads to an exploration of science. I'd argue that children (young children especially) are the world's most active scientists. Every time they throw something, climb something, jump off of something, fall down, get up, etc. they're conducting a physics experiment.

If calling a just-for-fun HCl+Al bomb a science experiment helps the world to gain another scientist, or even just a well-rounded, open minded, curious adult, then yes, let's blur the distinction between blowing stuff up for fun and "science".
Professional software developers who care about creating secure and maintainable applications that perform well will, by necessity, be very hesitant to use or recommend the use of PHP.

It has a very poor track record when it comes to security flaws, for example. It is also rife with inconsistencies and unjustifiable oddities throughout the language itself, and its standard library. Factors like those then promote the development of software that is of an unacceptable quality.

There do happen to be many extremely experienced software developers here at HN, and we won't hesitate to point out the flaws with various technologies, including PHP. This is not a bad thing; it's quite good. It's extremely important to be vocal about low-quality technologies.

These days, there are just so many alternatives that are far superior to PHP in every respect. Even with its new features, PHP is still not an acceptable option. So we shouldn't be looking for positives where there just aren't any, nor should we be surprised when all we find are negatives.
What is the goal in trying to wean people off Excel?

Is it just to get them on an open source solution or is it to replicate the functionality of Excel in something you've written/control?

Business users already know how use Excel. Spreadsheets were the original killer app. They have transformed business and I'm not convinced we've moved beyond their usefulness. It's the same argument as trying to reinvent SQL syntax for the NoSQL flavor of the month. Why try to change what your users are already proficient at? Why not instead try to feed data to that software in a more seamless way?

I may have gone ot from what you meant, but I'm interested in what you meant by the "wean Excel junkies off Excel" comment.
What is it? Twitter, Quora, Hacker News, Glipho, or ...
That is true. Even the most exciting work has mundane and difficult elements. There's no avoiding that.

What's infuriating is when it's all the mundane stuff, because management took the exciting parts and made them political favors.
Zoom In On Oklahoma Tornado Damage
There are native code compilers for Java, like gjc, JET, Aonix, RoboVM, Aicas, ...
Thanks for sharing this. Let us know if you have any questions!
Well, that does it for me. Like I said, anything else is gravy. In fact, I just moved on from my current contract today, because they were not paying on time. I was their lead engineer, and basically did all of their stack alone. I'm currently accepting offers if anyone is interested.
Everyone except pedants.
Lyft? Pink-mustachioed cars in Asheville, NC? You have no idea what you're saying.
"Airbnb, Tutorspree, and FlightCar have all shown that a contrarian nature is necessary to succeed."

a contrarian nature suggests that you are opposed to standard view. Yes, all the companies mentioned are contrarian in the sense that they do not follow the majority view of their respective markets. It's really a matter of semantics, but I would say what article is calling contrarian is at it's heart just disruptive innovation.
Because I already know C#, and why waste time learning Java which is very similar; what would I gain?

I chose Go over C++, because it looks easier.
The HN algorithm is more than just a function of time, upvotes, and flags. At the very least there is also a flamewar detection algorithm that shuffles flamewar inciting posts down. This algorithm, or similar, is also used to hide the 'reply' links during flamewars.
Making kids happy one shape at a time
> "... and then it's tempting to start kludging. I have a suggestion: get it right the first time."

Where this falls down in the real world is that oftentimes your understanding of the problem is quite limited at first. You'll ship a demo or an MVP, and that will teach you a little. As you continue to explore the problem through your work you'll often redefine it. Or it will redefine itself, as happens in so many war stories of service scaling, product maturation, and so on.
If your compiler doesn't warn you about that, try upgrading to an alternative. Anything more recent than the last twenty years should do.
I don't like the intermixing of photos and activity either, but you can get to a feed of activity only by mousing over the You menu in the top left and choosing Recent Activity, or go directly to http://www.flickr.com/activity

Regarding the SFW issue, I know Flickr has safety levels on photos...if you go to http://www.flickr.com/account/privacy/ there's a Content Filters section, but it's not clear if it would apply to your Contacts photostream or only searches/viewing another member directly. The setting says:

Choose a "safety level" that will apply to any site-wide
searches you perform or member pages you visit on Flickr.
You can also set the sort of content you'd like to see.
Adeo Ressi's 10-rule to evaluate startup ideas
It's actually free until you graduate. :) You just have to re-up every two years.
> ... should be no surprise to a thoughtful C programmer...

Those are in shortage nowadays...
UK students with .ac.uk?
But surely there's no reason for a simple ride to an ER to cost $900-$2000, is there? You could hire someone to drive you in a Ferrari for that.
Again: What the fuck are you talking about?

Where are the ads that actually call a screen that is not actually larger larger based on its diagonal? Most companies do not dare to step over that line. Because it’s wrong and all kinds of fucked up. Oh, sure, they might call a screen that is actually larger (but not quite as much larger as its diagonal might imply) larger and present the diagonal in big letters. But calling something that isn’t larger larger? WTF?

I’m sure consumers are often confused – but not because companies are actively calling something larger that actually isn’t.

I think you are very confused about what’s happing here and you seem to have serious issues separating consumer misunderstanding and companies lying. One is sad, the other is evil and has to be called out. And loudly. There is no weaseling out of this. This isn’t even a tiny little bit ok maybe if you squint. This just is not ok. (But, again, I’m not sure there is any intent here. Maybe it was just a stupid mistake.)
I have go call bullshit on this. You are probably younger than every Alaskan fishing boat operator today and you could go do that tomorrow if you really wanted. Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits?

I mean you can't really be serious with this, it's just a diatribe against the existing corporate hegemony, am I wrong?
Writer's Guilt
Its no substitute for a real db but, if you are stuck in Excel, I find that Microsoft's Power Pivot is a good transitioning step. It comes free with most licenses and is pretty well supported.

It adds SQL Server functionality to Excel, speeding up large queries, adding SQL-like query functionality and greatly extending the limits on data, such as the approx one million row max.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/bi/PowerPivot.aspx
It's only a very small exaggeration if we consider the context of HN, which almost always addresses middle-class people in developed nations.
This is the first lisp dialect which I can make sense of with just light reading. It's simple enough that I actually tried it and liked it. The output is fairly clean JavaScript which helps in learning and reduces barriers.

As a non-lisp guy who doesn't know any better (me), good job.
What if I tell you that, there're a bunch of people who do nothing but present themselves? And, when they're co-founding a company with you, they still do nothing but present themselves (not your company)?
And again, for the Americans (and others), in Britain ER is Elizabeth regina. I.e., the Queen.
Access can be a convenient way to distribute structured data that is relatively static to other people, such as colleagues in another office, when it is not worth the effort to get approval for and implement a longer term solution.

I'm surprised that Microsoft has stopped including it in the more basic versions of Office, since it encourages people to seek better solutions who otherwise might stay completely in the Microsoft ecosystem and eventually move on to MS SQL Server.
I'd personally pick Austin if I were looking for an already established major tech hub that is not one of the coasts. It's got a fun atmosphere too, lots of music and good night life.

I would also look at Atlanta, Boulder, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit. The latter is a really interesting contrarian pick: ultra-cheap real estate, neat history, and an interesting subculture of hacker/maker types.

http://www.omnicorpdetroit.com

Its dangerous reputation is mostly just reputation, but don't leave valuables in your car. Vehicle smash-and-grab crime is very high.
Here are my thoughts:

a) No, because email is the product in of itself. If you had to have an email account, login into your email account through a client, and then access something else that requires the previous two then I would say in that instance that it is DRM. In that case the email client would be the source of the DRM, not the email it gives you.

b) If you are required to have an account for a piece of software that controls your access to other software, be it to use or just download, then yes I see that as a form of rights management. To use my own analogy, I can burn my own DVD with no DRM and play it on my DVD player, but the DRM is still required to play commercial discs; therefore the DRM still exists even though I have an opportunity to not be encumbered by it. Or here's another thought, if someone's account on Steam was revoked, can they still use that account to download the free-to-play games that have no DRM? Granted, they could just create another free account, but still...
Yes, I'm not joking, I remember the commentator telling this on TV during the GP some years ago.
American Airlines Supports Startup World to Help Startup Entrepreneurs
> the "right thing to do" would have been to work with the respective standards body to extent / modify an existing standard to overcome whatever the restriction was

Generally, the way you work with a standards body to extend or modify an existing standard is the same way you work with a standards body to create a new standard, and that is:
1. Build a prototype product,
2. Get some use on it so you can find and knock off the rough edges,
3. Once your comfortable that you've knocked off enough of the rough edges, submit the new or revised protocol to the appropriate.
Homeland Security memo: access to 3D gun plans 'may be impossible' to limit
>picked up by emergency services will cost you money

It does cost you money. Europe plays a different game than the US but both are games. Thanks to Kennedy no one can be turned away from the ER for lack of insurance and bills are paid off later for cents on the dollar if you have no assets. If you have assets and no insurance too bad.
It isn't accurate to state that the US government "plans the complete erosion of our privacy rights".
Have we heard a lot of stories about deployed Golang apps having problems because of garbage collection? It's true that this is a significant designed-in advantage for Erlang, which can run it's collector on a process-by-process basis.

What's also true and potentially compensatory is the C-like degree of control Golang gives you over how you allocate memory and lay it out.

I'm not sure the unbounded channel thing is a real advantage for Erlang. I'm happy to be convinced I'm wrong. What's a real, correct design which would be hard to realize in Golang (without unbounded channels) that relies on unbounded channels?
> Golang has a more conventional, familiar, boring, "safe" language design than Erlang does.

Do you mean "safe" as in "nobody got fired for buying IBM" or as in language making hard to start thermonuclear war by accident? Because Erlang, with it's immutability everywhere is as safe as, or safer than Go.

> Golang has a more flexible concurrency offering than Erlang.

Basically everything you wrote here Erlang has. And what they were porting was in Python + GEvent, which means no threads anyway.

> a clearly delineated "just a bag of bytes" type designed from scratch for high-performance buffering

Erlang's binaries and strings (two different types) are designed for the same thing.

> but it might be tricky to argue that Erlang's process model is better than Golang's

Well, Go did a nice job borrowing Erlang's solution here. As it origins from Erlang, it has to be good. ;)

> Erlang requires an installed runtime and executes in a VM. Golang produces native binaries.

Erlang is able to produce a single binary. That it contains a VM and libraries and user code is another matter, but rsyncing Erlang binaries is also possible.

> Golang has modern, extremely high-quality tooling.

Dialyzer, EDoc, various process viewers, debuggers and so on for Erlang are really mature.

I think that familiarity of syntax, familiar programming paradigm and raw (single threaded, number crunching) speed were the reasons. Go has many benefits over Erlang in the realm of marketing, but I don't believe Erlang is much worse a language because of it.
> They are harder, but they eventually dominate the centralized systems.

Like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. All examples of big decentralized systems. Like the gradual consolidation of telecoms?

This is snarky, but only because I'm feeling sassy. Honest question, "Do decentralized systems actually win?" I hear this a lot as an axiom without any real evidence.
I tried to get one a few months ago. Still haven't heard from them. :(
go func(){ channel <- data }()

Here, you will never actually block on your send since it runs on it own goroutine. I can't see an actual use case for this kind of thing but since you are using this argument over and over then.. :)
I looked at this component when we wanted to make a "getting started" tour for Aha! (http://www.aha.io). However, I didn't like the idea of a linear tour where you must complete one step to get to the next. Instead I created https://github.com/aha-app/getting_started_balloons (for Rails 3 and JQuery) which allows multiple balloons to be shown at once.

The slightly novel aspect is the use of SVG to draw the arrow to the element you want to highlight. This allows flexibility in positioning the balloon so that it doesn't obscure some other interesting aspect of the screen.
The best advantage over a greenhouse seems to be stacking potential but that's only an advantage where square footage is limited.

The FAQ on their site seems to gloss over the greenhouse comparison only specifying the following: "It is more versatile, durable and cost effective than traditional greenhouses, and, because of its uniform configuration, it is a more efficient growing solution."

Uniform configuration? A greenhouse can be built in any configuration desired. I'd like to see more detail in that comparison.
Fair enough. Being something of a firearms enthusiast myself, I don't exactly agree, but I can see where you're coming from.
Detroit seems pretty fascinating.
I don't see the quote anywhere, either.
Bitcoin hits the big time, to the regret of some early boosters
A Survey of Freelance Developers, for Freelance Developers
>Exceptions refer explicitly to "asynchronous" exceptions

This is not technically true. You can throw exceptions from pure code, either explicitly or with something like an incomplete function definition (which the compiler should warn you about). However, it is considered very bad practice to do so.
Setting aside the lightning incident, would it be considered imprudent to plug in an electrical device while standing in water?
Help me spend $10k to make our app profitable
Hi hackers.
I posted fews months ago a blog post that had so much interest from the community: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5067709
It was about how my previous app was a flop and wasn't able to get enough traction (0$ in 3 weeks).
I got a lot of feedback from everyone here and learnt fews lessons the hard way.

Now let me introduce my new app: Boggler. Boggler is a variant of Scramble with friends and Ruzzle.

Contrary to the previous app (when I didn't have any marketing budget) this time I have $10k.
I know that money ain't everything, but I guess it can help a lot.

So I need your help on a few things :

1. Any feedback on the app itself
2. How can I wisely spend that money to be profitable: Got fews ideas I can share if anyone interested.
3. Help me get some traction.

Thanks! And you're all awesome.
yes, i think, if you mean 2 and 3. you have 1-2 and 3-4, then you entangle 1-4 which I think should lead to 2-3 entanglement without the 2-3 couple ever interacting at all.

I think it is called entanglement teleportation.
People have been trying to fairly distribute resources to give everyone a basic standard living for ages. It's the basic idea behind welfare, socialism, and communism, there's a precedent for trying to do exactly what I described as the CPAI.
When you're buying online, you're not getting that option.
Vt Gov Signs Novel Law Against False Patent Claims
Make A Microscope With A Laser Pen
Valid points, but even with the added value you mention its still debatable on if its worth the cost... I just don't buy into the whole "guns don't kill people" slogan because i don't see very many mass-stabbings...if we were all ninja, I might agree with it. However, this issue is complex. Way too many factors and not enough datapoints to know what direction to really go in,imo. We could take either side and cherry-pick facts and go round and round all day. I just hope violence overall continues its decline.
You ever filled out an application and gotten to that ubiquitous question: "Have you ever been arrested for ... or charged with ..."?

Sure, this case will always be on the internet, unfortunately. But at least then someone googling will get some context. At the very least she doesn't have to (legally) lie on that question after this.
Hey Underscore, You're Doing It Wrong!
I moved to SF in 2009 and left because a product I made got acquired by an NYC company. I lived in NYC from 2010-2012, then moved back. Although things have changed so much here that sometimes I have second thoughts!

There are some things you can point to as indicators (e.g. rents have doubled). But I have a harder time gauging the sort of atmosphere/ethos and whether that's changed or I have.
I got response in few minutes. And I don't even have .edu student email. weird
My profile is apparently constantly being corrupted. If I have to wipe Firefox's data on me every other day because of profile corruption then what is the point? If addons are guaranteed to mess things up then why does Firefox have that feature?

Let's be honest, this isn't meant to be helpful, it's just meant to shift blame back to the user.
This is true for virtually all software.

That said, Linux users do have an unwarranted confidence in the security of the operating system. The kernel developers actually don't care that much about security--but because it was designed with some level of sanity, most installations are headless, and the non-headless installations aren't used by very many people, it has been able to tout some apparently obvious superiority to e.g. Windows (which isn't really the case post-Vista, when Microsoft had enough of being a punching bag.) Same thing goes for Mac--a whole lot of confidence, but not a lot to back it up. Curiously, a lot more Mac malware has shown up after they gained considerable market share.

There is no security in this world, only opportunity.
We use Backbone as our frontend framework at my startup. A few months ago we evaluated guided-tour libraries such as Joyride, Bootstrap Tour and others. We liked Joyride at the time because it was declarative with some simple global setup and teardown callbacks, but it quickly became apparent it wasn't sophisticated enough for a rich web app where, in Backbone's paradigm, you're waiting for sync events and other events before continuing through the guided tour. We ended up having to fork and modify Joyride to support the behavior we wanted. This lib looks like a promising generalized version of what we had to fork Joyride to do!
If I was not a software engineer/tech entrepreneur, I would be Alaskan Bush Pilot.
How did online shopping work before the arrival of HTTPS?
According to Wikipedia, SSL was first released by Netscape in 1995, the year after Amazon.com was founded. How did they ensure security without using HTTPS?
Yes, you still can find the activity feed, but for practical purposes it's not on the front page anymore.

And I'm aware of content filters (since I disabled them). I don't feel like disabling/reenabling them every evening though.
Did I miss it, or is there not a license provided?
I agree with most of what you are saying, but I just don't see how this tool solves that problem. Both these options seem to be middle steps between the layman and full fledged software development. The Access/VBA route is slightly closer to the layman side while the DataNitro route is closer to the programming end (if you are the type of person who thinks Excel is a great front end for your database interactions, you probably aren't completely fluent with SQL). I don't see what advantages DataNitro provides that are worth jumping through the extra hoops.
One of the main things that drew me to Haskell is how little effort it takes to define a new type.
This is really cool. I've always been a fan of lisps, but not to the point of picking them up. Building for the web using a lisp has always seemed difficult due to (perceived?) lack of tooling, documentation, and community. JavaScript is for the web like no other language, and Wisp looks like it makes building web projects in a lisp a reality. Kudos!
You can always do something like

go func() { ch <- foo }()

then your normal program flow won't block. I guess that's what you mean by deadlock. If your program runs into an actual deadlock, the runtime will detect it, crash the program and show stacktraces.
How the heck do people get lost with navigation systems? Or, why would an amateur cabbie not have a navigation system?
Here are links to part 1 and 2 for anyone unable to "hack" the URL scheme. ;)

http://blog.whitehatsec.com/interview-with-a-blackhat-part-1...

(pastebin if it goes down: http://pastebin.com/jiUM0AFr)

http://blog.whitehatsec.com/interview-with-a-blackhat-part-2...

(pastebin if it goes down: http://pastebin.com/SAKS2CTW)
Plasma Workspaces 4.11: A long term release
E.g. http://amitgharat.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/an-approach-to-us...
> nd for runtime errors Go shows the entire stack

Erlang shows, logs, send via mail and telepathically tells you about what died where with all the details, and then additionally restarts the failed process according to restarting policy and tries again. Or not.

Anyway, I think this thread was about comparison of Erlang and Go - other threads are already full of people writing how wonderful Go is. As a part time Erlang developer, in this thread, I'd like to read what Go has better than than Erlang, not what is good in Go in general, because the latter is just increasing noise-to-ratio.

And it's possible to build single binary and deploy it with Erlang too.
I hate to be "that guy", but... the site does't work at all for me on Android. It redirects me to some mobile version and then displays an empty page.