skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would much rather the west create an infrastructure that minimizes any destruction from an infowar entirely. As much of all infrastructure in every country and all endpoints sold (phones, tablets, computers) should have end-to-end encryption.

If the USG wants to protect us from any country they consider an aggressor in the info wars, then they need to equip every one of us (its citizens) with the tools to protect ourselves.

The US does not know which of the kids today will grow up to be a Senator, Congressman, President, NSA agent, CIA agent, etc. If one of the infowar aggressors had the kind of information on every US citizen that we suspect the NSA to have, then that means that they could have enough information to blackmail many of this nation's future leaders, with many of us being none the wiser.

Take David Patraeus for example. What if a foreign intelligence agency knew about his extramarital affair, but no one else did. That's a perfect circumstance for that agency to coerce him.

Add to that fact that the NSA and CIA recruits heavily from the Mormon community. Imagine if one of those people was a gay and still had not come out about that fact. Such a person may be extremely worried about being outed to their friends and family in their religious community. Imagine if a foreign intelligence agency knew everyone who was was still in the closet. They would all be blackmailable. [0]

[0] One of my very close friends is bisexual and was raised as a very devout Mormon (but left the Church years ago) and she completely agrees that this could be a reality for a Mormon who has not yet come out of the closet, because of how much that community chastises people who are gay. Most of the people she knew growing up completely disowned her since coming out of the closet and leaving the Church.
Author here.

How would you improve the retention rate?

This article is meant for programmers from other languages who want to quickly look up a language specific detail.
Computer Simulations Shed New Light On Neutron Star Formation
Is It Wrong to Skip the Commercials?
Stanford dropouts are missing the boat on changing the world
It really doesn't deserve the real estate that it's taking up. Terrible decision imo.
>Sadly, this won't make the web fun again.
So two things that are important to note here, the first is that the 'fun' part of the web was learning new things and static HTML, even dressed up with HTML5 goodies, will be fun if you don't know these technologies but no more or less fun than doing the same thing on a Raspberry Pi or something similar.

Nobody cares about that BS.

The fun part was in the CONTENT, not the technology.
Yes but in considerations of legality, courts have often held that what is put into law is the intention of the law makers and not simply a set of words.

Now whether the courts would accept that in this situation or not is an open question. But one could still at least make the argument that the activity is illegal.
> I don't know what's currently available, but there's definitely a market out there.

Words that have launched a million (now bust) businesses.
I've come back to Java recently via Play Framework. To my surprise, Java can be a joy to use, so long as you avoid old-school frameworks, like Spring, entirely.
Twitter visualizes billions of tweets in artful, interactive 3D maps
In Defense of Unreasonableness – Saving the California Coast
Author here.

Sorry for that. I know they are objects but if you consider everything an object then really you have no primitives except object itself. Certainly this has a place in programming philosophy but not really a helpful point in a language-primer/cheat sheet.
I'm not worried about economic inequality in and of itself, but rather a lack of class mobility.
> In fact, they've been trained to do that with services like Mastercard Securecode usually implemented inside a frame to "arcot.com".

Even worse, the domain used varies based on your card issuer so there's no consistency.
Not necessarily a "Java" problem so much as it is a Spring problem.
Send your own Pocket Spacecraft on a Mission to the Moon
I don't understood the question either...

I mean, it has so much jargon on it, that what I felt is what I think my mom feels when I am talking with my dad...

I read, and re-read, and read again... And the only thing that I would think was: "omgwhy? wtf? WHY THIS EXISTS IN FIRST PLACE???"
Office 365 Is Now A Programmable Service For Rapid App Delivery
Agree, hiding clone URLs arn't good. Links are already in scroll area. And "copy to clipboard" doesn't help, it requires Flash, which isn't good at all on Linux
It's very good for democracy: mob rule by whatever faction is most popular at the moment.

It is very, very bad for republics.
Competitive link analysis in Excel
"But one thing’s for sure: if you can fight the allure of building the next Facebook today, you could develop the technology that enables the Facebooks of tomorrow."

Over and over again, we see that working from technology backwards to solve a problem is so much less effective than customer-driven innovation.

This author is completely missing the boat that we aren't living in the same world as Larry and Sergey were nearly 15 years ago. I would even venture to argue that the next Google is more likely to come out of ex-googlers who dropped out to work there than academia.
Because you don't hear about it growing in popularity or being used in the hot new stuff on HN.
I find it tremendously creepy that "Presidential alerts" cannot be disabled and you must receive them.
Being Upfront
ThisIsMyClassType

thisIsAnInstanceOfMyClass

this_is_some_ruby_or_kernel_c_i_copied_from_stack_exchange

_thisIsAFunctionParameterHavingBeenPassedIn

THISISACONSTANTDONOTCHANGE

THIS_IS_A_FRIENDLIER_ENUM

_____how_many_spaces__in_this_var

EDIT: Aaaand then there is the JS approach:

http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-identifiers
Bitcoin Exchange Makes Apparent Move to Play by U.S. Money-Laundering Rules
http://freedomsponsors.org is a crowdfunding platform for Open Source projects.

This is how it works:

1) Someone places a bounty for a problem (tipically an issue registered on an issue tracker)

2) More people might want to sponsor the same issue

3) A developer solves the issue

4) The sponsors verify the solution and pay the developer

The FreedomSponsors website itself is an open source web application, written in Django.
Funny fact - some of its own issues have been sponsored in the website.

The source code - along with instructions on how to run it - can be found on Github.
https://github.com/freedomsponsors/www.freedomsponsors.org
I'm pretty sure outside of your immediate network there are mathematicians who have heard of and even support tau.
Classical Inheritance is Obsolete - How to Think in Prototypal OO
Whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses are, you're wearing them.

I have a position on Tau simply because it's fun to think and talk about, and I really don't care if stodgy mathematicians disapprove. :)
6 Things We'd Change About Feedly
Isn't that a cost/value calculation? :)

You value some things because you enjoy them, more than you value other possible uses of that time.
Personally, my ability to understand a line of code drops off quickly when it word wraps, and if it wraps twice I have to stop and massage my eyes.

That's the main problem with obscene verbosity in variable naming, at least to me.
Isn't this now, like, the Duke Nukem Forever of Mac text editors?
The DeanBeat: The Last of Us is this generation’s masterpiece
Staged Payloads - What Pen Testers Should Know
> Some problems are complex and require complex solutions.

And yet some very complex solutions were solved with very simple languages, before Java was conceived.
> There is no law against murder, only a law that requires the punishment of murderers.

That's news to me. Is this actually your interpretation of the present state of affairs in the US, or is it just how you think things ought to be?

>The validity of moral imperatives and rights does not depend on the existence of any law.

That's not a point of disagreement here. The question is whether, in addition to the other moral imperatives, there is a (defeasible) moral imperative to obey the law.

>In my opinion, criminal law is just a device to facilitate obedience to moral imperatives.

Again, this is a fantasy view of the law, not one that can possibly be applied in practice. Consider theft. How are you going to determine, in every case, whether it is morally justified that someone owns something? You can always go back and find an injustice in the chain of events which leads to ownership. Or take a clear case, say, Bernie Madoff. Would it have been ok to steal from him because he didn't justly acquire his possessions?
I've always been baffled by the use of "Oh, it's just a few bad apples" as if that excuses things, when the original idiom is "a few bad apples spoil the barrel" - meaning that if you leave rotten apples with other apples, the other apples will rot, so you need to keep on top of the situation and get rid of the bad apples ASAP. But they use it like it was "a few bad apples aren't a big deal, get rid of them whenever someone leaks it".
Author here.

That would've been impossible because I wrote that 2 days ago =]
Your editor does have a bearing on your skill as a developer. When I interview candidates, the question I ask is "what is your favourite editor?" I don't actually care (much) what the answer is, but I do care that the developer periodically examines the tools they use a lot, and see if they can improve their productivity.

Editors do make a difference in your productivity - that is why people have favourites and why they have flamewars. That productivity matters.
This discussion on the NSA/CIA/DOJ/etc is teetering on the edge of respectability. Now every Tom, Dick, and Harry with an axe to grind is out running around yelling about some new abuse -- even if the story is a bit thin.

As tptacek says, this isn't a new thing. It's not even something that's all that interesting, frankly. People from various agencies cross-pollinate all of the time. If worked a boring analyst job at CIA, I might love taking a leave of absence and helping the cops out some. Sounds like fun.

Sure, it would be news if the CIA actually ran operations in NYC, but this story is about employees of the CIA being embedded in the NYC police, not about secret CIA operations inside the country. That's a different can of worms. Perhaps something bad happened. Don't know. This story doesn't inform us of it. Instead we just get vague allegations without proof. As the report states, this is an unusual personnel situation, not some massive policy disaster. The rest of it is just blown out of proportion by this author.

I've said this before, and I'm sure I'll say it again: the biggest problem with these freedom or safety stories is that people get way too passionate, try to interject their own narrative about how things work, lay on the paranoia thickly, and have a good old Donnybrook. Might get a lot of page views like that, but it's not useful.

People should be really concerned about what's going on in the US with regards to the security state. This is a serious problem and it deserves our passion. But "being concerned" and "having your chain yanked" are two different things. Smart folks know the difference. I'm not pointing a finger at this author precisely, but I'm starting to see a lot of overly-emotional, hand-waving tripe coming across the wires in the guise of various kinds of "breaking stories"
Spotify Is Expanding Its New York Presence, Plans to Staff Up to 200 Engineers
IOS 7’s Lightning Chip Detection Has Already Been Cracked
Two Hacker FBI Informants Try To Inform On Each Other
Agreed. The fact that (depending on what action you're undertaking) there are three different independent ways, each with it's own set of keyboard commands, to specify a selection area should say something.

Or that 99% of the community relies on external applications which to manage dwarf assigned jobs, since doing it manually rapidly approaches impossible as you acquire more than a dozen dwarves.

I almost feel that Toady should hire somebody to design an ASCII-based UI for the game that actually works.
in an internal, unfinished, maybe even experimental (see com.sun.java.* rather than java.*) bit of code that other people in the thread are saying was auto-generated.

I don't really see that class as a problem.
Some notion of testing before pushing to production mightn't be a bad idea, though. Or at least make bug reports quicker and less expensive, rolling back easier, &c.
Script to Download WWDC 2013 Videos
No doubt I have the wording slightly wrong: I took that in September or October of 1966. But whatever the exact wording, those who sat quietly with a sheet empty but for the name got 100% and the rest of us got 0%.

[edit: why be coy about the date?]
If HN was subject to a credible terrorism threat, they would be happy to. The CIA, DHS, and many other state and federal agencies work with the NFL and MLB to help protect the Superbowl and World Series. The NSA sends its people to help secure Google against Chinese hackers.

If they didn't, we would complain they weren't doing their jobs.
Apple does not care about your living room
I'm starting to look more at play on the side, except for the SCala stuff I keep seeing, as long as I can use it from Java and not have to deal with Scala's weird syntax then I think Play could be the new best hope (since it's not clear what Google plans to do with GWT - which rocked).
now that I've read this maybe I will be no more afraid to do a pull request! thanks!
Actually, the issue is that the site in question implemented it wrongly, and the users have the correct mental model. On my site, the users in red would actually be correct, i.e. logging out of my site would log you out of Facebook. This is also the more logical, consistent and secure approach, because if the user stays logged in on Facebook even after pressing "log out" on my app, just pressing the "connect on facebook" button again would log the user in without asking for a password. This is not secure.

It's quite simple: when a user is signed out on your app, use the javascript SDK to sign-out the user from Facebook as well. You can easily do this by loading the SDK, subscribing to the status-event, and if (user is not signed in in my application) && (facebook SDK says user is signed in to facebook), then call FB.logout().

This is a workaround though, you should just combine both when pressing the "sign-out" button of your website - i.e. send an ajax request to the sign-out page, send an FB.logout request to facebook, redirect user when complete. That has the added advantage that any time a user visits your page, and the client-side SDK tells you the user is connected through Facebook, you can automatically sign-in that user.

I've just completed going through the API and everything so I have a pretty good grasp of things right now, I should write a blogpost about how to properly implement Facebook sign-in, because Facebook is traditionally quite lacking on documentation, and definitely doesn't give a clear view of best practices.
You left out the part where you go to some protest (OWS, anti-gmo, anti-KeystoneXL, anything that opposes the corporate interests that run the government). That's what makes this whole surveillance thing scary is that it can easily be used to quelch opposition, not just to the government, but to the corporations whose interests are protected by the government.

The real divide is really between progressives who want less corporate involvment in government and more real government regulations, and those who benefit from regulatory capture. In the middle are those who don't know what to believe. For example, GMOs. The corporate interests want them permitted and unlabeled as much as possible. Progressives make noise about how they (or the associated pesticides/herbicides) could be dangerous to people and/or the environment. Government run by corporate interests doesn't want the information to spread to the less informed, they don't want people thinking about those things.

Protests and information campaigns are essential to a working democratic republic, and they will be the first targeted by the surveillance information.
Hardware, past, present, and future.
Is this bug still present in the MariaDB fork?
I just wish we'd commonly use self-owned/self-issued digital certificates at some point in the future.
To me, that's kind-of like saying the MacBook Air is a competitor to Apple's flagship MacBook Pro. They're two different products, made by the same company, doing pretty much the same thing but designed for different use cases. It's the way I always felt about Oracle vs. MySQL, even back before Oracle owned MySQL, that they are two different RDBMS platforms designed for two different use cases.

These days, that line may be blurred a little bit, and you can see how both paradigms (and more!) can be combined into a single product with PostgreSQL, but I feel like the MacBook analogy really sums up the way I feel about these two systems.
Ask HN: What podcasts will make me a better software engineer?
Oops, I meant to say "1387 days LATER".
Supercomputer efficiency jumps, but nowhere near exascale needs
It's a really hard problem -- especially for fractional scales where hairlines become blurry (or too wide, or too thin, or inconsistent).
Making of the Medium
shrug Everyone hates on MySQL, and I have my periods of hate as well (mostly I think they boil down to actually hating the Developers of MySQL, not the actual software)... But the thing is that for our purposes MySQL works and works well 99.9% of the time. Additionally the actual big, real issues/beefs people have with MySQL are mostly fixed in 5.6 (multi-threaded slaves (really guys, you should have fixed that years ago), online ALTER TABLE (again... wtf, why was that not fixed years ago)).

He also is hating on PHP in that article, which seems like prime HN bait, because as it does every time there is a PHP hate article on here, everyone actually doing real work comes and and says 'Okay, have fun with your rubies and nodes'.

With all that said, recently a lot of our data has started to be organized outside of MySQL (a lot more Couchbase and Solr usage), but MySQL is still there driving the core data. I'd say it all boils down to right tool for the job.
Reader is Dead
Same as it is now. They would communicate and legislate in a vernacular only they understand, adhear to an insular moral code unrecognizable to an outsider, and if you didn't like it, they'd call you a st00pid n00b, persecute you and continue to do whatever the fuck they wanted to.
Secret Court Declassifies Yahoo’s Role in NSA Disclosure Fight
Idea: An opinion aggregator
Alternatively, this is why Java needs a real namespace mechanism. "package" doesn't cut it. See: namespaces in C# or C++, or alternately modules in ML.

One thing I like about DI implemented in a language itself is that is that it negates the need to make factories in all cases. So, essentially, imagine if Java had C# style namespace and this was done using Guice-style DI.

bind(Persistance::Manager.class).toProvider(
new Provider<>() {
public Persistance::Manager get() {
new Persistence::Manager::TransactionAware();
}
});
I've looked at the list and I don't think any value would be lost due to these services.
Java is not a complicated language. Something about its affordances pushes developers into these giant labyrinthine swamps of abstraction violation, but the language isn't that complicated, either syntactically or semantically.
Cue the usual HN wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanies project cancellations:

Yahoo! Axis (June 28, 2013)
Yahoo! Browser Plus (June 28, 2013)
Citizen Sports (June 28, 2013)
Yahoo! WebPlayer (June 30, 2013)
FoxyTunes (July 1, 2013)
Yahoo! RSS Alerts (July 1, 2013)
Yahoo! Neighbors Beta (July 8, 2013)
AltaVista (July 8, 2013)
Yahoo! Stars India (July 25, 2013)
Yahoo! Downloads Beta (July 31, 2013)
Yahoo! Local API (September 28, 2013)
Yahoo! Term Extraction API (September 28, 2013)
I'm not entirely clear whether it meant "he believed he did not have the usual limits regarding being involved in domestic police work," as opposed to "he believed he had no limits - he could assassinate people, spy on anyone, &c." I think it was the former, but am not positive; the headline seems to lead to the latter. If it was in fact the former, then the headline is misleading.
Five Functions You Probably Didn't Know PHP Had
Wow. Naming really is importantant.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5944101

:)
Debt exists because of scarcity. Removal of currency/money and the concept of personal profit can be used to create abundance of our needed resources (food, water and shelter). This isn't magically caused by the removal of currency but by the changes in behaviour that tag along.

In agriculture for example, the current business goals are like any other, the most profit with the least expenditure. In an environment where the concept of profit is foreign the goal becomes how do we feed the most people with the resources available.

This would be a very different environment to what we have now, there would be a whole host of other changes to support this. It would be an extremely long process to ween off the concept of money/debt and create the infrastructure for something like this but I believe it is very possible.
While GPS works nearly everywhere, there's no simple affordable system to transmit your location.

Oceans are huge, and even sattelite transmitters don't cover everything. Example:

http://www.gpstrackersandmore.com/spot2-gps-tracker

http://www.findmespot.eu/en/index.php?cid=102

Even if something like that worked perfectly, oceans are extremely dangerous. A huge wave can destroy even a large sailboat in seconds.
Drew Houston: opportunity cost when deciding to start a startup?
The SCOTUS is the Constitutional Court. The problem is, they only hear cases where the Appellant can demonstrate standing. It's really hard to demonstrate standing when the matter at hand is so deeply classified that no proof of standing can be brought to bear.
30 years of MSX
This might be too lengthy of an explanation, but if you're interested, this section from Wikipedia would help explain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution#Judi...
What would make the web sexy again is to find a solution to allow "privacy"! Privacy IS cool.
I couldn't disagree more. While Apple may be foolish to release a full TV with the screen, opening up apps (read: games) with the new third-party controller support in iOS7 only stands to grab them easy market share and grow the living room iTunes purchase portal. It's easy money with little RnD. My guess? They're just waiting until shipping an A5X with 64GB flash storage in a hockey puck is possible at $99.
Hackers built that program and hackers are running it, and hackers are responsible for the pervasive social media/analytics infrastructure that made it possible. Hackers have an ethos but like anyone else, they can put it aside when money, power or principle suits them.
And I thought C++ led to complex abstractions.

It makes me wonder if it was just accident that Java developed this way, or if it could have been an xml free, simple interface language.
I'll miss AltaVista. I have a fond memory of using it when I was 10 or 11. I used it to search for "Mortal Kombat 2 combo moves", which led me to GameFAQs. It actually took a lot of trouble at the time, as I had only moved to the U.S. a year prior and had trouble formulating the correct phrase before in order to get that information. I was quite proud of myself.

Amusingly, if you search for that phrase on Google today, GameFAQs doesn't even show up until the second page.
For the layman, What does database administrator mean in this situtaion?
So, basically like a third Obama term?