skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's not the extra 1000 instructions of this call that is concerning. It's the extra 1000 instructions per thing-that-would-have-just-been-a-null-check summed over every running process on your machine if this actually took off as a standard idiom.

I think for most cases where what you want to do isn't throwing an error on null, most of the time null checks are addressing external interfaces (database or otherwise) where the IO is going to be enough bigger than the pattern overhead that if you are able to deal with the load from the basic functionality, the difference between null check and using this "teller" style implementation is going to be negligible.

And, obviously, where you want to error-on-null (whether or not an external interface is involved), this isn't the pattern to apply.

> If we keep adopting readability tricks

Factoring out commonly used boilerplate into a library function isn't a "readability trick", though it does benefit readability and maintainability of code.
Ask HN: How do I get into programming?
I'm thirty years old, I work in the fast food industry, I'm pretty good at HTML and CSS and can put together a pretty website. I'm learning PHP and Javascript slowly and for the past couple of years I've spent my every spare minute coding something. Yet, I haven't got any work experience in the industry and I want to be a programmer. How on earth do I break into the industry?

Responses would be appreciated
JQuery Promises: The answer to PostMessage's asynchrony
Most of the Airbnb's I've used are far closer to what I'd expect in a suite at a moderately nice hotel

I think that AirBnB operates very differently at different price points. Once you're paying more than $x, you're right- you basically get whole apartments. And below $x you're paying less than you could ever expect for a hotel room. But in the middle is this awkward area where you're paying a relatively decent amount to stay in someone's spare room, and have to deal with the extra complications that brings but without the larger benefits.
Many of us in SF would like to PREVENT this city from turning into a place like NYC. Yes... there is a problem with capitalism (or, more accurately, with unfettered "market driven" capitalism). But there are two other problems which you ignore. First - in the Bay Area the problem isn't just capitalism, it's also the behaviors of those working in startups. These behaviors make startups in particular (and tech in general) a very (VERY) easy target. Second - do we want homogeneity in our lives? Do we want SF to be just like NYC? Is there something different and special about SF that deserves preservation?
Nudge | The Instant Messaging App Like No Other by Afif Mulla
I've got balls of steel.
For folks that are interested, I'm working on an open source platform called Nitrogen that helps you get devices online easily and communicating with applications using a consistent JavaScript development model. Still a little early but I'd love to find folks interested in hacking on it either as a user or contributor to the project.

You can read more at:
http://github.com/nitrogenjs/service

</shamelessPlug>
Thank you for helping get the word out about Rails 2.3.

Ignore the haters.
Custom SSL's for CloudFront Supported Now
I wish it didn't block videos.
Ruby Mixins & ActiveSupport::Concern
I'd leapt at the title, thinking that the article claimed evidence for a fourth-generation (u,d), (c,s), (t,b), (something new) quark, which would be incredible news. This article describes the potential observation of a four-quark bound system, made up of known quarks in a novel arrangement.
"Are you willing to work nights and weekends to get an assignment done on time?"

Here's the thing about this question -- I am, in fact, willing to work nights and weekends to get an assignment done on time, if that is a relatively rare event, the deadline is actually meaningful, and if when it happens it is recognized as a failure of planning that will be post-mortemed so as not to become a regular event.

If you ask me that question on an interview, though, that's a huge bright red flag that you're a terribly employee-abusive employer and I should never work for you. If you'd like to believe that guy you interview after me who just nods his head at that question and hopes for the best is more of an "A player" than I am based solely on his answer to that question, good luck with that.
My mistake. I hate dodgy content filtering, and reacted before I considered alternate meanings for your comment. Upvoted you for being helpful.
I'll reserve judgement until I use it but it does look promising.

Now, if they could solve that nasty problem wherein the issues list seems to revert to an earlier revision when you use the browser button I would be a happy camper.
Show HN: Stripe for Printing
Actually they are 30+ out, already.
Even if he's as pure as the driven snow, I don't think Snowden can assume no one will ever trump up a rape charge against him.
Virgin America's entire fleet has Wifi (though it's not eh fastest) and AC outlets. (Other carriers only have wifi on select flights.)

What's my rush again?
Just for people like you: No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.

The things you can learn if you click the link, huh?
Show HN: APIxChange A marketplace for custom API integration.
"The only reasonable solution is to pay for it with the federal income tax."

Pay out of property tax. Follow the money and keep the money loop as small as possible to maximize return on investment and minimize accounting losses.

99% of your lifetime medical expenses are going to be at the hospital closest to your home, most likely. Makes closing the loop simple and obvious.

If for political reasons you have to go county sales tax to pay for the county hospital, that works too.

Much like the most effective way to fund a local school system seems to be local prop tax rather than the feds or the UN or something.

"Companies cannot be put in the crossfire of ... with these unimplementable laws."

Its never slowed down any other regulation for any other reason in the past, ever, so may as well not start slowing down with health care.
There is a lot going on in this demo, and I really appreciate the camera parameter selection, the dust on the lens (cf Tour 2), and depth of field rendering.

I do have one feature request: click-to-autofocus. Maybe I missed something, but focusing is pretty tough with the sliders.

Great work on the demo!
Jonathan Mayer Threatens To End “Do Not Track” Talks
They should have some resources to pull in if they need to, they're smart guys :)
I haven't tried anything I like, yet. Here are my requirements:

1) fast!
2) both web version and mobile app that syncs with the web version
3) the same or similar interface to Google Reader

It seems Digg might have this eventually (they say they're working on an android app)

TheOldReader doesn't have a mobile app, and it is quite slow. But I like their interface on the web :)
Even fewer read cover letters. Most people hiring in tech do the following:

1) Ignore cover letter

2) Scan resume for signs that employee may be at all relevant

3) Contact for phone screen

Anyone who requires a cover letter is not someone you want to work for. It's simply disrespectful and burdensome for a prospective employee who will often be ignored.

No transcripts, no GPA.
Is there any pricing information available? I imagine there will be a subscription service required for the cloud compiling.
Another math-y option is to note that the Fibonacci series satisfies the linear recurrence F[n+2] = F[n+1] + F[n] and can therefore be represented in matrix form. Here's a (trimmed down) Maxima session that gives the details:

$ maxima
(%i3) load(eigen)$
(%i4) A: matrix([1, 1], [1, 0])$
(%i5) b: columnvector([1, 0])$
(%i6) fib(n) := (''A^^n . ''b)[2][1];

<n>
[ 1 1 ] [ 1 ]
(%o6) fib(n) := (([ ] . [ ]) )
[ 1 0 ] [ 0 ]
2
1

(%i7) makelist(fib(n), n, 10);

(%o7) [1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55]

Since the transition matrix A is symmetric, it can be diagonalized using its eigenvector matrix:

(%i8) similaritytransform(A)$
(%i9) Adiag: expand(leftmatrix . A . rightmatrix)$

And the n-th power of a diagonal matrix is the same as raising the values on its diagonal to the n-th power:

(%i10) AdiagN(n) := matrix([''(Adiag[1][1])^n, 0], [0, ''(Adiag[2][2])^n]);

And thus raising A to the n-th power is the same as raising its diagonal counterpart Adiag to that power and then reversing the diagonalization transform (since leftmatrix and rightmatrix are inverses and cancel out for the interior multiplications):

(%i11) fibdiag(n) := expand(rightmatrix . AdiagN(n) . leftmatrix . b)[2][1]$

Finally, this leads to a closed-form representation for the n-th Fibonacci number:

(%i12) fibdiag(n);

sqrt(5) 1 n 1 sqrt(5) n
(------- + -) (- - -------)
2 2 2 2
(%o12) -------------- - --------------
sqrt(5) sqrt(5)
>Are you willing to work nights and weekends to get an assignment done on time?

As an interviewee, I'd probably see that question as a huge red flag suggesting a disorganized, "last minute" culture.

Don't get me wrong, I fully believe in putting in the time to get the job done - when it becomes necessary, but I'd need to understand why and how often it becomes necessary before answering a question like that.
A DMCA takedown request requires "Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material." Generally, this means that the company submitting the takedown provides a specific list of URLs with infringing content. They can't just say "videos infringing on x exist on your site, go find them", and the safe harbor provision of the DMCA means that Google isn't responsible for hunting down infringement on their own.
Apple says it can’t read your iMessages. What about everything else?
Yeah, so... NY to London is 25 seconds is about 500,000 mph (~Mach 650) average.

Perspective: Mach 32 gets you to escape velocity, and the nuclear manhole-cover (which may have been the fastest manmade object ever) is estimated as somewhere north of Mach 200 or so. That's right: not even an atomic bomb can get you the kind of speed you're asking for. :P

Hmm. Assume an even acceleration profile, with your first 12.5s accelerating and the second 12.5s decelerating, 1 million MPH peak. That's ~1800 times the force of gravity. Forget physics; the biology involved can't accomodate such an improvement. :P In fact, you could probably put a floor on the travel time from anywhere to anywhere by assuming passengers aren't really interested in experiencing much more than 1G accelerations.
Perhaps I am a pessimist, but I don't see the future turning out well for those who have chosen to cryogenically preserve their bodies.

Most cryonicists agree. It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you.

How long does someone have to be dead before you say, "What value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living?" Is it a valid argument after 5 minutes? A year? 100 years? If it were technologically possible to revive people from the 18th century without significantly taxing our own resources, some organization would probably be doing that right now. And the newly-revived 18th century people would probably try to revive their friends if they could.

Of course cryonics organizations don't just toss heads in dewar flasks and forget about them. If revival becomes feasible, the organizations doing it will probably be the same organizations that have maintained frozen heads for decades.

You say cryonics is an act of faith. Most people sign up not because they're convinced it will work, but because they think the expected value is positive. For someone moderately well-off, even a 3% chance at a much longer life is worth the $120/month that a typical life insurance policy and membership costs. Heck, many medical procedures are more expensive and less likely to benefit. If we were talking about an experimental cancer treatment that cost $80k and had a 5% chance of working, few would reject it due to the price.

Those who sign up are usually convinced by evidence. Which brings me to the question: What evidence would convince you that cryonics is worthwhile?

If scanning electron micrographs of cryopreserved mammal brain tissue showed intact nanostructure, would that convince you? How about reversibly-cryopreserved mammal organs? What if a team of scientists cryopreserved a bit of rat hippocampus, then warmed and re-fused it, and couldn't distinguish the cryopreserved cells from control cells?

These have all been done in the past decade.
Rabbit kidney: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
Rat hippocampus: http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf

As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith...

I don't think cryonics in its current form is likely to work, but I do think the probability of it working is high enough that it's worth signing up. Does this sound like a faith-based argument? If reasoning combined with scientific journal citations is faith, then call me a zealot.
Asking "Are you willing to work nights and weekends to get an assignment done on time?" would indicate to me as the interviewee that this employer might have had problems in the past abusing this particular privilege.

Maybe re-title the article "how to make your candidates weary"?
Sure Ecuador are very independent now. It would only take one election (perhaps with extensive foreign ad buys), however, for their policies in this area to change drastically. I don't see that happening soon in China or Russia.
On the other side of the coin, your hotel is unlikely to cancel on you at the last minute (which happened to me recently with an Airbnb). So you are accepting a certain level of risk. It's also less convenient to book an Airbnb, especially if you are only staying one night because most hosts have a two night minimum. Mostly, I agree with you, though.
Feedwrangler has been getting good buzz too.
You can still technically modify the contract. Copy it into an email and delete the bits.
If you don't have a formal CS education or working experience, you can still get a job by demonstrating competency with personal projects or open source contributions. Create some kind of website or tool or project that people can see use and get a feel for your abilities. Fix some bugs in open source projects and let people check out your Github profile.
I don't use or support services like AirBnB for this reason. If any of these "disruptive" services actually cared about their customers, they would gladly comply with government regulations that are meant to protect us.

AirBnB is great if you're white, able-bodied, and have no expectation of quality (or even an expectation of a safe, habitable environment), but just Google around for issues of racial discrimination with hosts and AirBnB's complete lack of support for disabled people.

These are all issues that have been through the legal system for close to 100 years, yet now we celebrate when we throw out our progressive ideals for something as petty as cash savings?
Not everyone.

My mother's death was in many ways her last gift to me. I would not have traded her for what I have gained. But neither would I erase the experience of loss, as painful and traumatic as it was. I am a much better person, a much stronger person, a much more compassionate person.
Sure, some e-commerce sites have been started by people who didn't major in CS--particularly the ones that have started recently. No one is arguing that all e-commerce sites have been started by CS majors.

But it was inaccurate to say that e-commerce sites are rarely started by CS majors, when three of the largest and most well-known ones were all started by CS majors.
Feedly, Feedbin.me, Feedwrangler [1]

[1]: http://www.macstories.net/news/reeder-to-add-support-for-fee...
Graphical Tools Help Security Experts Track Cyber-Attacks in Real Time
This sounds strange, as far as I understand it:

http://www.lovdata.no/ltavd1/filer/sf-20130514-0484.html#1-2
http://www.lovdata.no/ltavd1/filer/sf-20130514-0484.html#2-6

together states that if you provide email services, you are required to store metadata (which is what the Data Retention Directive is all about).

On a side note, if the secret services cooperate to do massive ingress/egress storage of data on the network level (say for 6 months) -- having easily passable meta-data would help turn that massive data dump into useful information (assuming index and organization around ip/date or something similar).

As for being safe from NSA outside of the US (even with an ally) -- that makes no sense. While it is against Norwegian law to hack into Norwegian businesses - the NSA isn't subject to Norwegian laws, their subject to US law. The secret services are explicitly set up to preform illegal actions in foreign territories (which is why the NSA story is about spying on Americans, rather than on spying in general).
If you think that cryonics is more likely to let you enjoy another day of life than being buried or cremated, there is a point.

Doesn't it seem weird to go from "This part of the problem seems unsolved to me" to "this idea is completely pointless"? Just because you didn't immediately see a solution?

To answer the specific objection: People are curious, and people aren't jerks. Cryonics is still extremely novel, and if revival is possible the subjects of this decade will be incredibly rare individuals any self-respecting anthropologist would fund in an instant - to name one of a dozen possible solutions.
You could do that, but I wasn't specifically talking about Taleo or similar systems. When I was on the hiring end, we just got resumes via email and didn't read the cover letter.
I'll take a shot too. I don't use most of the fancy features on Github, so I have almost no experience with these things.

<> - code
! - warning / danger
|7 - merge a fork (or accept a pull)
E]E] - I think that might be a dictionary. Look something up?
_|^\_ - Heartbeat to let you know how active a project is.
|+. - Charts to see activity.
4 - Fork
>< - settings. Funny that it's a wrench and screw driver. Although I guess a keyboard and mouse would be a little less telling.

These seem bad because you can't get information about them before you interact. The icons are small, and kind of hard to make out (I had to turn my screen brightness up to see what was going on with that book one). But, once you get a little bit of experience with them (click them once), you'll have that icon (or just the order) ingrained in your brain. It sucks for people who aren't technical, or who are thrown into Github, but it's not bad for experienced users.

That is until next week when they decide they got the ordering wrong, and some of the icons wrong, and randomly swap and replace icons.

This kind of reminds me of the very challenging 'Is this thing I made hard to use for people who don't know what's going on?' It's a very hard problem - you, the creator, are designing and fabricating something that you want other people to use. You think you found a good way there, and you obviously found the best way because that's the way that you're going to build it. The path was obvious, we went from A to B to C back to B then to D, detoured to S for a while, didn't like the color sceheme, went back to D, then decided B was the best one. You have a lot of experience with alternate configurations, and have innate knowledge of how they work on the inside. Someone who comes up and uses D without any primer might be a little confused. Why do the colors matter here? Well, it's obvious, we went from A-B-C-B-D, it's a natural design evolution, ARE YOU TOO STUPID TO SEE IT!?!? You won't be one of my users... It's hard to distance yourself from what you're working on to see the flaws in your own design. It's very hard. It's easy to assume the knowledge you have, or the knowledge you as an organization have, will be present outside your group a priori. You don't know what they don't know, but you know what you know.

Regardless of whether or not you like the changes, Github has probably been following this 'design evolution' for a while, and they like where they're at, and assume you're smart enough to know beforehand what the icons do. Or, at the very least, smart enough to associate an icon with a topic related to git.
I understand why people are objecting to your comment here, and I don't have any quarrel with them.

But this was exactly my experience of deep loss.
I agree, this is really well done! Did you try the camera parameter autofocus checkbox?
Hello everyone!

We're a startup corporate eLearning company that specializes in making corporate training fun through gamification.

For the next two months, we're holding a competition for developers to submit small browser games that can be played in short sessions that deliver meaningful training content. There's an example video and more details on the site - which you can check out at http://games.axonify.com/

I'd like to stress that if you're in the market for building HTML5 or DOM based games and want to win some extra money - you've got nothing to lose. If you don't win a prize, you retain rights to your game fully.

This is great opportunity to submit small games you may have made with Construct 2, Game Maker HTML5 or other tools, as well. As long as they implement our API and follow the guidelines - you're set!

If you have any questions - please don't hesitate to leave a post or check out the contact address on the web page.
Hope to see lots of Hacker News devs participating!
Also, three of the companies he mentioned have CS majors as co-founders.
I don't know why, but take it as a signal that it this isn't as interesting to the HN community.

If you think about it, it's not avoiding null checks, it's just moving it to a different place. The null check still needs to happen in order to know when to call the block, it just happens to be in the datasource.whatever code.
The compiler cannot ignore an unused dependency. The compiler must first process the imported packages, then compile the current package. It only knows that an imported package was not used until after it has finished compiling the entire current package.
True enough, but that scales very poorly, while their current approach demonstrably scales rather well.

In a game of picking one's battles, that seems like an easy win; I'll worry about contempt charges and rubber hoses some other day.
From their original blog post I had an impression that they will try to mirror Google Reader's API and features:
"We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API)"[1]

Now they haven't mentioned API at all, they haven't replied to a question about Reeder, and they did put quite a lot of focus on their web and mobile apps.

A conclusion I draw from this is that they don't want to be a dumb syncing API, and just like Twitter, they want to control the clients (their own apps).

[1] http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader
Yup, pretty nice, indeed. I found an "autofocus" switchbutton in the "Camera Parameter" GUI folder. Then it automatically pulls the focus. But yeah, click-to-autofocus would be nice!