skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was not 'bashing' scala. I discussed the tradeoff between removing old cruft from the language and breaking old crufty code. I was careful throughout that entire comment to only discuss differences between the languages and communites and not make or imply any value judgement. I'm trying to provide useful information for people deciding between scala and clojure, not start a fight.

With regards to binary compatibility, what I think you are missing is that clojure libraries are almost always distributed as source code. The clojure compiler is fast enough to just compile everything at runtime (during development at least) and clojure has not broken source / api compatibility since the first major version. Where AOT compilation is useful is:

a) Improving application startup time

b) Shipping libraries which generate java classes at compile-time (usually to

c) Shipping proprietary libraries without source code

I would definitely like to see the community figure out binary compatibility between libraries to improve cases b and c but it's really not a pressing concern.

EDIT: On AOT compilation http://dev.clojure.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1572898
Expect to see more of this with the systematic destruction of the 4th amendment.

The U.S. domestic policing agencies have become militarized in both tactics and weaponry. There is no middle ground anymore. Either they are in full battle-rattle complete with assault vehicles, automatic weapons and drones or undercover in plainclothes. Any reasonable person in her situation would be confused and scared beyond their wits, not even considering the imprisonment aspect.

It's pretty GD scary - how are we supposed to identify the good guys?
> Editors do make a difference in your productivity - that is why people have favourites and why they have flamewars

The fact that people feel strongly about something does not mean it is important. Lots of people have very strong feelings about the New Jersey Devils or the Miami Heat. That doesn't mean that sports or teams matter.

I'm not saying your conclusion is wrong, but your comment does not constitute a valid argument in favor of that conclusion.
Git Branches Are Not Branches
Seems that these problems are Clojure's selling points.
Foundation 31 – Ev Williams
NYC's extremely low murder rate for a big city in the USA is really nothing special compared to other major cities world wide.

I think the context is useful in comparison.
You are interpreting this precisely backwards.

These "Rights" are unalienable. They are not to be given away, they are not to be taken away. Governments exist to secure these rights. To help protect these rights, the government may exist... but only by consent of the people being governed.

It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it's citizens, or that these citizens yield these rights to the Russian government. Nevertheless, according to the morals listed in the DoI, the US government is founded on the belief that Russians have these rights, because they are human beings.

Therefore, the US government, when dealing with 'men' of any nationally, needs to respect the unalienable Rights which all men have been granted by their Creator. Anything else is hypocritical.

Edit: after thinking about it, it gets even better. Because foreigners have not consented to being governed by the US, the rights of foreigners not to be spied on by the US government would go even further than the rights of Americans. And yes, I know the DoI is not law. But if we Americans cannot simultaneously claim to believe in it's principles and make laws that contradict it without being hypocritical.
This sad little anecdote is the perfect embodiment of the (lack of) spirit of a free speech zone.
Virginia Public Colleges Raised Prices, But Not to Compensate Faculty
Maybe it's also your information center.
Would be interesting if numbers were available to see what happened in terms of the number of people assigned to homicide division. Did they remain the same (meaning they can spend more time say on each crime) or did they go down?
iOS Push Notifications: No Take-backs
discuss
That's a great idea! Although, you know the Dev tools has a canvas inspector built-in? Check out chrome://flags and enable the "Enable Developer Tools experiments.". Pop open the console and then Settings (bottom right corner cog) > Experiments > Canvas inspector. This enables the ability to profile a canvas and view the different states between draw functions. It's really nifty.
> The credibility of the documents he revealed is the only thing that matters.

That's essentially my point WRT Snowden. The very documents he leaked were inconsistent with his story. Now everything else that was leaked the government can claim that the people are missing the context of, and about a million other debate/propaganda techniques that come into play when you are able to show that the messenger himself has biased their reporting.

> Also, any association with china, russia or ecuador is irrelevant.

It's not irrelevant, and I explained why already. The impetus for change will have to come from the people. By fleeing and making it Assange vs. the U.S. (again) Snowden has made it that much less likely that the American people will see the situation in terms of an assault on them personally, and more likely that they will see it as an assault on America by unpopular foreign governments.

What you are saying would be true if it didn't matter what the people thought, but public opinion actually counts for a lot, even in America.
You need to find an iron mine in the map first, and then you can put workers for irons.
Apparently at least some of the crime statistics have been fudged.

The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation
http://www.amazon.com/The-Crime-Numbers-Game-Manipulation/dp...

So now I don't know what to believe. My guess is that violent crime has gone down, but not as fast as the police depts have reported.
I can only agree with this, having spent my first 6 months of C#/.Net programming with only a highlighting text editor and the command-line compiler. And a browser window open to read the official .Net reference.

Now that I have been using Visual Studio with Resharper for much longer, I understand how unbelievable that setup was to those who followed the Visual Studio path. But if it were my own dime, and still constrained by having to use C#/.Net, I would go back to the text editor + command-line compiler.
It has a lot of value to sit back, grab some popcorn, and watch the warring comments between camps. It's easy to get stuck in a rut using a tool you know, and these sorts of discussions can yield a look into what other people use, what their process is like, and the pros/cons encountered by somebody who has used it for a while.
Post-quantum crytography and TLS and other applications
At what point do we seriously start evaluating the use of post-quantum crypto for normal applications, such as TLS?

Now that we know there are certain government agencies that plan on storing encrypted data for future cryptanalysis [1], I'm starting to think there should be some thought put into this? AES is secure (at least AES256), but not RSA/EC. At least in theory, doesn't that mean TLS in its current state, as well as various other applications relying on the same concepts, is effectively useless?

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/20/exhibit-b-nsa-procedures-document
> The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act.

That's why action should not come as an open fight. History is full of examples when revolutions only lead to blood, after which other elites simply take over and keep exploiting everyone else. Or, alternatively, revolutions fail and after a bloody fight the same elites stay in power.

If you want real change and bloodless revolution, start using Bitcoin. Don't pay them a cut if you disagree with what your money are spent on. It's not democracy that keeps politicians in check. It's simply money. If they have none, they're powerless.
At least they dropped the charges. Whatever misgivings I have about how the whole thing went down, at least they dropped the charges once things were straightened out.

She probably was, technically, guilty of eluding police and such, but I'm glad they did not go through with that. I'm sure she's not happy about spending a night in jail, but just as I give her credit for mistakes in the heat of the moment, I'll give the police the same.
Why the book’s future never happened (2011)
I thought it was yet another of those articles with an inflammatory but ultimately misleading headline designed to get on Buzzfeed and Reddit. Boy, was I wrong. The story was actually worse than the headline.
"Database is thrashing the disk again."

"Man... just symlink it to devnull."
If Bitcoin had built-in deflation, it would destroy the earth
R (Statistics Software) in your web browser
"After a while, the cars that case the neighborhood will stand out with a few records, whereas the resident cars will have many records."

Along with all the cars that are just visiting friends in the neighborhood, &c. I'm not saying it couldn't be useful, but it should be treated with care.
Try it on Java and say you still want a dumb editor. It's like saying you want to do rocket science while doing all the math by hand. Why drive a car. Why not walk to grocery so you could reflect carefully on what you want to buy and feel your muscle twitching after carrying 30 pounds of grocery back. Tools are there to help out with the labor and free up your mind for the more important. There is nothing wrong with understanding all the details, but there is no point repeating it all the time once you do.

Edit: That post also mentioned the fear of exploding complexity. The whole point of abstraction is to manage complexity. The fact that you have a function being called at a hundred places and you don't keep track of them all in your mind is not something to fear, if you do the abstraction right. The fact that the previous fact makes you feel unsettling, should make you feel doubly unsettling.
Hopefully the data was encrypted while you were moving, since they're listening on the wires too.
>The absurdity of it though is that you can stay in the subsidized housing program long after you switch industries and make bank.

My guess is that that is a side effect of the fact that you can stay in your subsidized apartment long after you switch industries and make bank. That does not seem that absurd to me: in general, Americans are too rootless, so a policy that incentivizes some people to continue to have the same neighbors seems worth some amount of divergence from "perfect economic justice" or whatever you want to call it.
Going from completely free to completely paid is a bit of an "all or nothing" proposition. There are ways to mitigate risk in this type of transition:

- Migrate all existing users into a special "free subscription". All new users pay.

- Have a pro tier and a free tier. Extract value out of the free tier through any combination of ads, one-off payments (aka IAP), having them invite friends to retain access, or generate content in some way.

Would love to hear more techniques for de-risking the act of putting services through this type of transition. Anyone have some?
If you write bad code because your editor makes it easy for you to write code fast, then it is not your editor that is at fault.
I saw iron.io, I thought immediately it was another Ruby bashing article.
I believe you have the wrong case there. The source [0] is available for your review.

[0] https://github.com/clojure/core.async/
Share some love to our buddies rubyists
Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else...

Just saying,..
You would need a substantial percentage of a population to stop paying taxes to send the government a message. If you do it on your own, you run the risk of getting a message. A coercive one.
Oh, I thought that's what the replier was asking about. The border stuff, I think you're right that 'constitution-free zone' thing is rather hyperventilaty.

On the other hand, the notion that a bunch of uniformed, armed dudes pulling you off the I5 well north of San Diego for no apparent reason and asking things is 'a search you can refuse' is a little glib. When it happens, 'but wait there is case law' or 'I saw this on youtube' is not the first thing that comes to mind.
To be fair to her, these were agents who were not uniformed, who (it seems) did not sufficiently identify themselves, who surrounded the girl and her friend, who drew a firearm, who tried to break their windows. If I was in that situation I would attempt to drive off as well.
Easing end of life: Startups that help people make the ultimate decision
Can't agree more. I have yet seen a good programmer who complained about their tool making them write fast. When you write shitty code you don't blame it on the good IDE.
Glenn Greenwald Speaks Out at Socialism 2013
The past tense of verbification of DuckDuckGo should probably be 'DuckDuckWent', right?
Well, just making it a business won't change anything. It makes no difference to the users. It does make a difference to potential cooperation partners. However, I've got my first requests for cooperation after a year or two. Don't count on it.

If amateur photographers are a big majority of your users, the next logical step would be to optimize the whole website for amateur photographers to get more of them. Start to target amateur photographers explicitly. Post your service in amateur photographer's forums, change the copy of your website to appeal to them. State all benefits of your service in terms of value that amateur photographers get out of your service.

For example, take the home page. It doesn't say anything about amateur photographers. Why not? If this group is 80% or so, you could put a headline like "Perfect photo storage for amateur photographers."

If your website appeals to a very specific niche right now and 80% of your customers are from that niche, it makes sense to optimize your business around that niche for now and expand into new customer segments/niches later.

By turning into a paid service, you also need to act and behave professionally. Some people have new expectations. For example, the service shouldn't be down often. You have to have backups, security etc.

And from here, it is all about business development. I learned so much from HN. For a start, read everything from patio11 and his blog. Sign up for his newsletter.

Read the book "Getting Everything You Can Get Out of All You've Got". The part about internet businesses is a bit dated but the rest is a gold mine for opportunities for business development.

Read stuff about copywriting. Read everything about lifecycle emails that are all the rage now. Introduce an email course for amateur photographers how they can get the best value out of your webservice, get some testimonials etc.

Ask amateur photographers what features they need from you and what kind of benefits they get from your service.
This could've easily gone wrong. What if they had a gun in their car? A knife? A gram of pot? What if there was a minor injury to the agents?

All for a 20 year old drinking beer?
IEA: Renewables will be world’s second-largest energy source by 2018
how would they have known she was underage, yet not known that it was bottled water not alcohol? Why would it be appropriate in any situation to pull a weapon for a possible underage drinking charge? There is too much about this that doesn't add up - there should be an investigation.
I liked Hacker News better when it was a place for sharing and discussing start-up based news.

Not to say that these other types of articles are not worthy of reading and sharing. But I can get them elsewhere.
--- SPOILER ALERT ---

Really enjoyed the game the whole way through, but I agree with other people on this thread, the ending (or lack of) kinda ripped my heart out. Glad I took some screenshots before flying off into space.

http://bit.ly/17K3a1D - Building Screen

http://bit.ly/12tUk37 - Production Screen

http://bit.ly/17K3ldl - Dusty Path Screen (After getting Compass)

http://bit.ly/14Eyk4u - Map Screen

http://bit.ly/17sIVSm - Starship Screen

Sorry, no screenshots of end sequence - was too busy dodging falling ASCII characters.
Runs faster in memory, allegedly.
> implying that Vim is an IDE
They should also add provisions for:
(1) Trial by jury
(2) Public hearing
(3) No solitary confinement
(4) No other forms of torture. Name an organization such as Amnesty International who is responsible for determining what is and is not cruel and unusual torture.

I would also like to see Obama debate Greenwald live on national TV just like the Frost Nixon debates, but I know that would never happen.
I think this is extremely cool, but I'm struggling to understand the disadvantage of actors compared to channels.

I think I understand the argument; just not sure I'm convinced by it. As I see it, the argument goes like this: Suppose you want to set things up so that block "A" is sending messages to block "B". With channels, block "A" just sends a message to a channel that it was handed; it doesn't know or care what is at the other end of the channel. The higher-level code that set things up created a channel, and then passed that channel to both "A" and "B". So, everything is loosely coupled, which is great.

With actors, on the other hand (so the argument goes), you would have to create actors "A" and "B", and then send "A" a reference to "B", saying, "Hey 'A', here is the actor to which I want you to send your output." So now "A" and "B" are wired up, but there is no explicit "channel" object connecting them. I think the argument is that this is worse than channel, because there is a tightly-coupled connection between "A" and "B".

But I don't think there is. In my scenario, some higher-level object still had to create "A" and "B" and wire them up; so, they are loosely coupled.

I think it may, perhaps, be true that an actor system lends itself more readily to tight coupling than a channel system does -- in other words, an actor system might lead the casual programmer down the wrong path. Is that what Rich meant when he said of actors, "Yes, one can emulate or implement certain kinds of queues with actors (and, notably, people often do), but..." ?

If I'm missing something, I'd love to be enlightened!
This American Life did a story about this [1] not too long ago, and featured an officer who recorded conversations from NYPD supervisors instructing officers to downgrade or not report crimes so the precinct looked better. There's also another story about the use of CompStat in the NYT. [2]

For the context of this post, however, I think it's fair to assume that murders are getting pretty accurately reported, since it's hard to downgrade or not report a murder.

[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/nyregion/new-york-police-d...
It's also important to remember that this was before the industrial revolution, when almost the entire economy was agricultural, thus the South was far more powerful than the north.

The Civil War started right after the industrial revolution ended. By this time, the balance of power was greatly in favor of the North.
Why do you pull a gun on an underage person buying beer? (Especially when she's not even buying beer?)
absolutely - if I had been armed I would have tried to defend myself - unless there are major parts of the story missing I can't see any justification for their actions
If you're in chrome, open up dev tools, then hit resources, find the local storage on the left bar and click on the url. You'll see a gamestate key and the value. Copy the value, that's the entire game state. You can then create that same key on whatever other browser with that value.
The poverty rate has been going up in NYC as the crime rate has been going down: http://www.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2012/sep/20/new-york-...
Reality check: for all the ills of warrantless wiretapping, computers are still an overwhelmingly positive force for enlightenment, empowerment and liberation of people across the world.
I use emacs or sublime for java coding 90% of the time. Of course it is vital to have large screen real estate/extra monitors so I can keep the various docs open for reference. I prefer this approach because I learn more about the particular apis I'm using rather than just autocomplete and go.

That said, I have occasionally needed an IDE for java projects but in hindsight that seems to be because those projects were so needlessly large and convoluted that it didn't make sense to try to understand to the entire project in my head. That sounds bad, but that's how I see it. Some projects aren't worth understanding fully, and a good IDE is required for them.

Long story short, I can see the need for a java ide sometimes, but I won't call it a necessity.
Indeed, it could have. That's why I'm glad it didn't go more wrong and that they didn't double-down on the mistakes and press charges anyway.
If you have a small business, the free tier doesn't add any value to your website. If everybody pays, the value proposition is very clear for everyone. Also, you need to consider that people, who use your service but don't think that the value of it can be expressed in terms of money, are not a good fit. They are a burden somehow. If they don't get enough value out of the service to pay a few euros a month, then you shouldn't do business with them. Of course, you've got a problem if nobody gets any value out of your service, but then you didn't have a good business idea in the first place.

However, I'd always add a trial period for new people.
"That's what I thought this particular game might be."
Well, you were wrong. This is a great game BTW. I'm hooked. Turn on JS and enjoy, or go play with what allow yourself.
> Culture is a big part of it, yes, but often 'nation' does include aspects of ethnicity.

Google defines ethnicity as: The fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition.

Sounds a bit circular.

> Nationalism is something people seem to naturally do.

Nationalism is something you do? How does one nationalism?

> Whether it has a 'point' or not in 2013 is pretty irrelevant - if people are doing it anyway, it's important to try and understand it

Based on what I've gathered, nationalism is a way to arbitrarily distinguish your culture from another in hopes of inevitably forming a border with your neighbor in order to enact a national government?

> Do you think I'm some sort of racist for trying to explain a concept to you that's prevalent across the globe?

Not one bit. I understand the notion is prevalent, but I wonder if we would be better off without it. Similar to racism, it's prevalent and we would be better off without it. I do feel that many arguments in favor of national pride work in favor of racial pride as well -- which is why I brought it up.
Thirdly, there's also the effect of the newer policing techniques, like the 'broken windows' approach. It's likely some mix of all three.
What about the Dutch government, and the Swedish government, U.K. government, and Canada, etc.? The EU itself has a data retention law that Germany doesn't follow, but don't the rest of the EU member nations participate?

FWIW I do feel that American citizens should have to 'participate' just as much in these schemes as the rest of the world, if these schemes are to exist at all.

I suppose what I can't figure out is why the reaction is devoted solely at the U.S., when it seems Germany is the only major Western society that cares that deeply about it.
You need to consider all improvements in trauma care since 1990. Some victims that would have died in 1990 would make it today.
ClojureScript: Lisp's Revenge [video]