skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I loved PHP at first too, but the more I started to do serious work in it, the more I grew to hate it. There's so many better languages out there these days, but PHP seems to live off the hype it gained when it was basically a choice between CGI/Perl, Classic ASP and PHP.

PHP ended up annoying me so much that I switched back to Perl (using mod_perl for performance critical stuff). However my latest project is being written in Golang (I know it's all just personal preference, but everything that I hated about PHP, Go seems to get right)

I know many HN members will already be familiar with the following blog post, but it highlights up many of my frustrations: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
Yes, I calculate benefits when I spend my money. When the government spends my money I ask why, if its because the government will then spend less of my money on something else, I ask why is the government doing the other thing to begin with.

I'm pretty sure blood won't run in the streets and mass murderers won't roam with impunity if we don't install Linux on our old boxes.

I'm all for the government being limited to fewer things, so the political will has less to argue about, and we can all get back to talking about the weather and arguing about religion.
but... are you bonded?
- The study of ethics is inherently valuable. Regardless of what other studies tell us about "what to do" or "how to do it", we must assign some value or priority to our actions. You could try to use the findings of any other fields of study to guide your decisions. With psychology for example, we can study what makes people happy, and base our priorities on that. But ultimately you've just made an ethical decision to act on utilitarianism. It's inescapable that we make some ethical decisions, so it is worthwhile to study which ones are "best".

- Philosophy does not exist in a vacuum. In the same way that a work of art can lift someone's emotions, teaching and studying philosophy has real-world consequences. Had Hegel's works never been published, the world may have never seen Marxism, as one very big example! It's worthwhile to study philosophical theories within their own language and internal logic to understand the impact that they have on people. E.g. it is helpful to study Ayn Rand's thought itself, and not just the way it affects people's psychology, or the effects of its political applications. For example if it can be disproven by it's own internal logic, that has implications on its applications - we don't need to apply it to any political calculus to determine "P is not P" is false.

Sorry if my explanations aren't that great. I personally don't study philosophy, and can't offer much more from the top of my head, but I believe my apology of it so far is sufficient to at least say it isn't useless!
If the information he has is very valuable it's not only the US he should be running from.
In other words, just text/e-mail/call/talk quietly to yourself.

(I'm sorry, I couldn't resist the jab, and I fully accept all down votes that come to me on this one)
Snowden in Iceland?
Bah! Why is it bad and why must it die? Please add content to this discussion - I don't agree with you, but maybe you can convince me. Try it.
As a Ruby programmer, I face the same sad state of affairs in Ruby frameworks unfortunately.

Nice writeup about all the alternative, well done.
It seems Dilbert.com is killing RSS-Support. Their feed item only show "Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com."

Any alternatives for my daily Dilbert fix, short of visiting the website?
I actually used OData recently and love the query syntax. I actually see the awesomeness in it. But we should wait some time untill it gets better :-)
(see the following)

What i hate mostly about it, is when (and this is the implementation in Web API mostly):
- synchronizing with XML (jSON is the standard :-( )
- no flexibility on put / post and patch methodes (eg. dates!) - easy a nothing object ( eg. date datetype and <birthDate /> --> your parameter object comes in as nothing... Also, they must use the yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss format
- put / post / patch methods and a complextype (eg. Address). GRMBL!
How Internet startups lose value with greater traction
Likewise! For me, it was MOAI: http://getmoai.com/

Since I became a Lua programmer, I really can't stand any other languages, and I've rapidly switched to it for my scripting needs. Tables are just soooo lovely. ;)
If the talk started at 7, it would be rude to arrive anything later than 6:50. I think this is great, blocking people at 7. There is no other way to get things running on time and without disruption.
For those who wonder what the hell this is about, I always find the following story a good introduction to the demoscene:

Jonny looks around, confused, his train of thought disrupted. He collects himself and stares at the teacher with a steady eye.

"I want to code demos," he says, his words becoming stronger and more confident as he speaks.

"I want to write something that will change people's perception of reality. I want them to walk away from the computer dazed, unsure of their footing and eyesight. I want to write something that will reach out of the screen and grab them, make their heartbeats and breathing slow to almost a halt. I want to write something they are reluctant to leave, knowing that nothing they experience that day will be quite as real, as insightful, as good. I want to write demos."

Silence. The class and the teacher stare at Jonny, stunned. It is the teacher's turn to be confused. Jonny blushes, feeling that something more is required. "Either that or I want to be a fireman."

- Denthor of Asphyxia (1993, if I recall correctly)

(As an aside, it's clear that what Jonny really wants to make is the Oculus Rift and not demos, but hey, he's just a kid)
Waste time with the ones you love
Must read C++ book list
My guess is, he was put into a waiting car owned by a foreign government and whisked away somewhere or taken to another waiting plane and 'smuggled' out.

But this has been planned with pinpoint precision and I expect there is a lot of 'back channel' negotiation/diplomacy being carried for safe channel to fly him to Ecuador or wherever.

He will probably only turn up officially when he is out of arm's reach of the USA.
Why is this posted and upvoted on to the front page at least 3-4 times a month? It's a great resource, but I don't think that warrants pushing other stories down as it resurfaces so frequently.
I switched to tt-rss last Sunday. I have a cheap VPS that I paid 15$ a year, set up a minimal debian, install nginx and postgresql, let tt-rss import google reader feeds and starred posts and install the mobile app as well. A good looking skin and now I have a nice replacement. Not so difficult
Crypto.cat seems to be a browser extension only model now, which is a lot better. I don't use it and haven't looked at it seriously, so I don't know what kind of auto-updating it does, which would be a problem. Assuming the authors (or someone else in control of their extension-submitting password) wanted to serve malicious code, they'd either need to get users to manually download a "bad" extension, or auto-update. To the extent that the browser vendors can be trusted, this isn't as big a problem -- you couldn't backdoor just a given ephemeral applet, so someone might catch it. OTOH, I think a browser vendor could choose to give a single user a "bad" extension, and could modify it themselves without crypto.cat's involvement, so you can only trust it as much as you trust the weakest of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Crypto.Cat, or anyone who can technically or legally compromise any of them.

Crypto.cat internally implements OTR now, so it has forward secrecy. So all of these attacks are around gaining limited access -- to the contents sent using the exploited application.

The old javascript version was at risk to cloudflare, the crypto.cat team, and everyone else. Plus browser exploits. It was horrible. The worst part was the crypto.cat developers responded very...emotionally...to any criticism of their security, which kind of detracted from the whole thing.

This whole "binaries distributed by a third party" model used on mobile and for browsers does expose a lot of problems. Since there isn't a strong cryptographic signature on the binaries linked to a key uniquely controlled by a developer and securely distributed to the end user and verified in something the user can trust, the platform or store vendors (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, ...) can pretty much screw users at will. (they can just use a different trusted key to sign the binary).

The old "distribute source code with PGP signatures or signed hashes of the tarballs" is still the best way to distribute secure software.

My #1 feeling about crypto.cat is extreme envy for the Catalan domain name.
One thing (of many) that simply must be handled better for video conferencing to even getting close to be a viable replacement is the "eye contact" problem. People need to be able to look in someones eyes on screen, and see them looking back at them.

For the occasional call for e.g. an interview, I make it a point to look into the camera, rather than on screen, and it makes a big difference in how I get perceived, but that turns the video aspect into a one-way thing - like looking into a TV camera. While looking at the screen means you loose a lot of the signals you'd get face to face just from having a harder time reading facial expressions, and from the way peoples interaction change when they don't get eye contact with you.

There's lots of other bits and pieces that impact its usefulness too, but to me solutions to the eye contact issue needs to be there before there's much point. E.g. in my experience with teams seated close together, eye contact is often the primary indicator that you've gotten someones attention and can start asking a question and know you're not interrupting something important.

Without that, you're either back to the keyboard, or "polluting" the environment with distracting speech - often I see team members using IM even to someone at the next desk over when failing to get eye contact, exactly to avoid disturbing everyone else by speaking, so that's a non-starter.

It's an incredibly important part of communication that most current video conferencing seriously hampers.
A comprehensive guide to Ruby & Rails installation with screencasts
He never confessed to treason.
I don't understand what you mean by "without your permission". I'd expect to have all the keys so it would be 'secure' in that sense.

The problem I want to solve is having proper ownership of my stuff without having to do that much more admin. I'd use the cloud as just storage. We're not necessarily that far ahead from having this now as services like tarsnap [1] offer part of what I'm after. I think the missing piece is that no-one's strung the, together into a overall product-offering.

[1] http://www.tarsnap.com
My approach is to measure my progress by how much less stupid I feel the n+1th time I read the material again. I hope if I just keep chipping away it will enter my brain by a process of osmosis.
c) github
Back in the old times there were hackers and programmers.

Programmers had a degree and understood malloc and bitwise operations. They were engineers, but they were not "cool". "Programmer" wasn't a good word anyway, so they called themselves "Software Engineers". They worked for big companies, creating boring software for managing numbers and creating graphs in a fancy way. Yep, there was only IE4 back then and nobody ever thought that you could create JS script more than 100 lines, which does something good, so they had to learn and use Delphi, Visual C, etc.

Hackers were people that understood security flaws and exploited them ( also they were the guys that steal from someone's credit card and similar. ) Pretty much the hackers were those people who dropped out of school and didn't want to go back, because they hated programming complex stuff. This didn't make them non-experts. In fact back in those days hackers didn't need to work for a big company and made money with doing fancy network-routing kernel-hacking stuff for a local internet provider, buying / selling three-letter domains ( old times remember! ), creating and supporting websites for pirated software, MP3s, etc ( Imagine Morpheus' matrix team ... ) Hacker was more like a criminal. ( Remember the first movie, titled "Hacker"? )

Nowadays :

Now I see some different perspective here. You got your CS degree for a couple of years and you see that the technology from your uni is obsolete. Yep, C, C++ are here for good, but if you want to deal with Web applications and web development you'll have to know Zepto, Backbone, Angular, LESS, SCSS and nothing of this is old enough ( and perhaps will never be ) for university.

So in summary ( IMHO ) :

Engineer for me is someone who does low-level programming ( C, ASM, C++, etc. ) and knows what Hz is by definition.
Developer (web) is someone who develops some stuff and don't predict Memory flaws and doesn't do flow-charts for most of his work ( Although, he does some testing :D ).
Hacker (nowadays) is a Developer on the edge - He is a developer, but also wants to enhance his work into an art. ( writes plugins, frameworks, etc. )
"wanted for leaking some of America's most confidential information"

You can't make that up haha.
that seems a bit far fetched. the way i understand n, it means " f input ", as "the parameter that f takes as input, whose type is an integer". Anyway, that's probably just one way of reading the question. Really depends on what the interviewer's intention was.
Right, he's in the international transit area, so not officially "in Russia", despite being within Russian territory. (There was that stupid movie The Terminal with Tom Hanks which might be relevant here...)
Yep. Notice how long it's taking Python programmers to change major versions.
But it would be hard to do that without creating a notation for parse trees; and once you do, your language has become a skin on Lisp, in much the same way that in OS X, the Mac OS became a skin on Unix.

TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp.

It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful.

Couldn't agree more, ancient philosophy (and most of contemporary philosophy) is a complete waste of time.
I guess one good thing about this charade is it keeps the media interested. These sorts of stories normally disappear after a few days, with only the most enthusiastic person able to dedicate their time to follow them.

Same thing with Assange, him being stuck in an embassy is a bit of a freak show (can't think of a better phrase). He pops up randomly and the press can't help but point their cameras and microphones at him. Assange is practically on the media's doorstep.
Does it contradict with anything I've said?
Peer code review - a matchmaking service
I am not sure whether I find it more disturbing to see that people here think it is in any way fair to pay people for not doing anything, or that they think it is economically possible to take something with a perceived value, exchange it regularly for zero on a mass scale and for this thing to retain its value.

Suppose you give a bar of gold to everyone, for nothing, every month.

Question: what's gold going to be worth on the market in half a year?
The title is ambigous. I speak russian, so I've checked one russian news resource: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

Lavrov actualy said "Snowden hasn't crossed the russian border", not "has not entered Russia".

The quote from the article in OP's link:
> Correspondents say Mr Lavrov's comments suggest that Mr Snowden remained airside after landing in Moscow, and so has technically never entered Russian territory.

During last couple of days there were a number of news telling that Snowden flew to Moscow but never crossed the russian border(he had no visa anyway). The only new information in bbc's article is Lavrov's confirmation.

So: Snowden (probably) crossed HK border before flight to Moscow, but after arrival in Moscow he (probably) hasn't crossed the border.
You cannot use a scroll wheel, which is annoying enough.
> they actually need Google's secret key, instead of using a CA under their control

Note that Google runs their own CA (signed by Equifax's Root CA) and, thus, issues their own certificates.

The way things are going, I see no reason why the NSA could not, with a FISA warrant, simply order Google to:

1. provide them with a copy of Google's CA's private key; or,
2. issue the NSA a certificate valid for *.{every-google-domain}.com.

Maybe they can.

Maybe they have.
Isn't the obvious answer, abs and negate? ie

f = negate . abs

That way f always returns a negative regardless of input.
Discover App Challenges
Because you're thinking about it wrong. They key to understanding git is to understand its data structures. Once you understand basically how it works, then all the wacky commands become shorthand for manipulating those data structures. It's really not a complicated system.

Watch this video: http://vimeo.com/14629850
Funny coincidence - In the place I work this is done with a bajillion lines of python. The entire DSL turns into a bowl of spaghetti with worms hidden throughout!
If it turns out neither China, Cuba nor Russia stop, threathen or interrogate Snowden, the comparison leaves USA in a very bad place.
carefull with that line of reasonning though. i had one candidate that self destructed with this behavior. he didn't like my questions, and did very poorly on the test ( which i warned him before was very specific, and i knew didn't pretend to assess completely his skills). but the talk i had with him before that convinced me that he was still an interesting candidate.

what happened was, even before i told him anything, the guy decided he wanted to stop the interview. In the case of that guy, the tests showed that he took failure in a very very bad way.
Yeah, Feedly's interface can't seem to get out of its own way.
It doesn't even sound the same.
Too bad it's ugly and has lots of ux-quirks.
Why don't more painters have hacking jobs?

Most painters I know are Luddites. Especially well-established ones. They think that resisting technology gives them some kind of higher moral ground point of view. They believe that technology sucks people into an alternate reality where they lose contact with the real world and thus become insensitive to the problems of modern societies.
> US officials have defended the practice of gathering telephone and internet data from private users around the world.

> They say Prism cannot be used to target intentionally any Americans or anyone in the US, [...].

What a relief to us unAmericans..
For me, with a maximized Firefox window in Ubuntu on my 1680x1050 laptop, the page is just exactly the right length that when I get to the bottom of the page the subnav becomes sticky, and it's got margin bugs whereby it doesn't fill up the space where it was (surely Bootstrap got that right? Apparently not), which shortens the page length, causing it to come unsticky again... end result: I can't access the summary row at the bottom of the table.
so what if i call f(f(-1))? It should return 1.
This was my thought as well. So many people jump to complicated math when the question was about a function. KISS applies, as does out of the box thinking. :)

And here's a solution (in PHP, my language of choice) that doesn't use any static variables :

function f( $n ) {
if ( is_string( $n ) ) {
return -1 * (int) $n;
} else {
return (string) $n;
}
}
Nevertheless:

06/25 14:37 RUSSIAN LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES MAY DETAIN SNOWDEN TO ESTABLISH ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, INCLUDING PASSPORT DETAILS - SOURCE

http://www.interfax.com/news.asp
I'm unsure of how technical to make this, or what your background is, however:

Let's take a "classic" of Dennett's[1], against the "brain in a vat"[2]; from what you know about feedback loops or dynamical systems would the proposition of imagining a 'brain in a vat' ever make sense to you? (Note: it's not merely a Matrix style imagining, you have to prove it's not happening - you may well consider this a pointless experiment, of course).

I suspect not. That is to say, if you learned about Complex Systems prior to reading the debate over 'brain in a vat', the entire argument would probably strike you as absurd (I may be projecting here, feel free to say otherwise). This is where I presume Paul is coming from: "Well obviously no, what a waste of time". However, proving it logically is precisely what a lot of Philosophers have spent time doing (as opposed to wiring the brain up, not something that was technically possible until very recently). There's value in the logic of it, and the thought, because it is such a common human misconception (that the mind / consciousness is separate to the body, or the world or the universe).

Does that make sense?

[1]http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.ht...
[2]http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5
It's a pretty good example of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - the travellers are firmly at the self actualisation stage whereby they do not need to focus on fulfilling lower needs.
Well, foundationally here, if you want to talk about voluntarism all those kids are forced to be there, and their parents often don't have a power to stop it (too busy to homeschool, too poor to private school).
I totally missed it. If it weren't for your I wouldn't even see it.
There's only a "scroll right >" in a very light grey and small font.

Including a bigger arrow icon after the right photo would help.
I hope the the NSA spying story stays in the media for many months, because I fear that as soon as politicians stop fearing the outrage over this, they will immediately grant immunities for this like they did with carriers earlier, and will also probably pass new laws to make whatever people may suspect NSA is doing now is illegal (not just unconstitutional) to make it legal. But if they fear outrage, they might not do it yet.
--- US Secretary of State John Kerry said it would be "deeply troubling" if it became clear that China had "wilfully" allowed him to fly out of Hong Kong. ---

As a generally pro US European I have to wonder if the US realizes the extent of the PR disaster it is creating with each passing statement. I mean what does this idle threat really accomplish?

It makes China look good, it makes the states look like the bully and it carries absolutely zero weight. If anything it just makes China look stronger internationally.
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Don't forget to add a some specific keywords to the question.
But why do I have to understand its data structures? As opposed to just using SCM like every other one on the market permitas.

I've not ordered yet another weird database, why is it on my bill?
> He also called on Russia to "live by the standards of the law because that's in the interests of everybody".

What he means is that he calls on Russia to side-step its own law and enact US laws in Russia when it benefits the US.

And that the US should be allowed to side-step the law whenever and wherever it so damns pleases.

What a hypocrite.
Searching for Cicada Song: a crowdsourcing project
Don't Even Think of Using Encryption Software to Escape NSA Scrutiny
Thank you very much for the detailed reply, I am glad I asked, I would never have thought of any of that!
Google Mine: new Google Product coming?
Auto-Refresh for Play Framework Apps
About as long as a slow boat.
TL;DR Uses a browser plugin and browser is refreshed every time a source code file is saved - no server restart, build or even browser refresh required. Less clicks = better.
Why don't you weight votes by age of the account? That would make the "old HN" more influential in the current one.