skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
maybe the default toString() should be a unique ID, as it is in for example Java, but it's not really a big deal.
How often do you need object A->object B associations like that? Far easier to just put a pointer in all the object As to point to object Bs, and then put the object A's in an object/array.

Your use case is not something I've ever needed to be honest, and if you need it, it's simple to build it out yourself. For example, in an object constructor, just replace the toString() to return a unique ID for that object. A line of code :/

It's only dangerous when you don't understand what is happening. Why didn't you research why your image example was confusing you? As I say, read the book.
Google asks its employees to spend 20 percent of their work time to basically design stuff that doesn't have to be accounted for by any data. I assume that they get a steady input of raw design that way, and that they are not dangerously impoverished there, or in danger to become so.
I'm not sure that's necessary. Can you link on a resource that says positive rights always result in the violation of someone's negative rights? I guess the negative right of property would be violated by the tax cost of the internet.
The Perfect Desktop - Mandriva One 2009.1 With GNOME
Doesn't Australia even ban regular porn?
IMHO, it is hard to find a domain that is challenging, useful, and small. But a couple of examples listed above are pretty good:
1) Write your own web server, blog software, etc: By leveraging existing libraries (or not!) you can get a lot of effect for very few lines
2) Script your daily chores: It does not matter what language you write the “scripts” in. Choose your current favorite and get a feel for how you can interact with the OS
"The report of my death has been grossly exaggerated." - Mark Twain

Much like the endless stories of the death of Apple in the 90's, this article exudes an arrogance unsupported by the facts. Certainly, Microsoft has made many mistakes and are not at the top of their game right now. But to suggest that "Internet Explorer’s marketshare will probably dip below 50% within three years." is a sign of their decline is comical. Below 50%.. within three years.. the horror.

Microsoft continues to be a dominant force in the business world and will for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, they now have competition again on many fronts that will only serve to push them to refocus and improve the products that have declined in recent years.
Yes, it would. People aren't persisting in using Emacs because it's a good editor, but rather because it's an integrated environment for manipulating anything textual (which happens to be scripted in a Lisp dialect). The integration is the important part, and it's integrated in a very different sense than, say, Visual Studio or Eclipse. It just happens to have ergonomically nightmarish default keybindings (and other historical baggage), and a culture that perpetuates them.

I've tried viper mode (I used vim for five years before I started using Emacs, and I still use nvi for quick editing sometimes), but it's against the current of the ten million other settings Emacs has.

I would love to see a real alternative to that facet of Emacs (and would work on one, if I ever got that kind of time...), but vim isn't it. Wily / Acme are closer, perhaps, but they trade complex keybindings for switching constantly between the mouse and keyboard, which is likely worse.
How often do you need object A->object B associations like that? Far easier to just put a pointer in all the object As to point to object Bs

This gives us an equivalent mapping, but unfortunately it alters the original object by adding a property to it. This sucks for two reasons; one is that the names might clash with a property that something else has set on that object, so you end up creating terrible names to avoid collisisions like someObject._prviate_associatedOtherObject or something, and then you have to make sure to destroy it when appropriate. It gets more hairy if you need multiple relations between the same objects. The other problem is that when you enumerate an object, now that property will show up. Gross. Yes, I know about the boilerplate you use to make enumerations in JS safe; my argument is that JS sucks as a language, and the necessity of stuff like this contributes to it.

For example, in an object constructor, just replace the toString() to return a unique ID for that object. A line of code :/

The Cappuccino/Objective-J guys at 280North have to do something similar (grep for OBJECT_COUNT++ in the source to see what I mean) in order to add identity to Obj-J objects.. but what if you didn't instantiate the object yourself? And I think this is the case where you'd be most likely to want to perform a mapping on an opaque object.
I think I get it. We're trying to help the other countries build stronger economies. When people are desperate, feeling powerless and without hope, they tend to seek violent means to attain that power and hope. But by empowering other countries to lift themselves out of poverty or giving them the tools to become "first world" players, we actually make ourselves (US) more secure.

Said another way, it's a form of foreign aid. Looked at from this point of view, you wouldn't let anyone stay unless there was really a special need.
That's why I like HN... Always good feedback :)

Thanks for the help, I will implement those very soon..
What did you do for your mother on mothers day?
What did you do for your mother today? See what I did on my blog and also subscribe for the big piracy debate tomorrow!
You know, not too long ago Internet Explorer was regarded as dominant force on the web (98% after all), now (at least where I am) it is already on the edge of falling below 50% (last week's numbers are 51.5% of all IE versions combined).
And yes Firefox pushed MS to refocus, which gave us IE7 and IE8–so what?
Being the dominant force at the moment does not mean you will stay here for long. Unless you have a clear vision ahead. I fail to see any signs of that vision on MS side.
Well, if Bruce passed comment on it, it would be publicity, bringing it to the attention of many that would be interested.
For those that don't know, Bruce Schneier designed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_%28cipher%29
Microserfs - they start as employees and create a startup.
I would tend to disagree since nearly 30% of web servers run IIS, and ASP.NET is one of the most popular web frameworks on the market today. Considering that it is largely competing with free servers and frameworks, that's fairly impressive.

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/04/06/april_2009_web_...
we work out of red gate softwares (cambridge, microsoft tools, red-gate.com) offices, if you're good (and I'll trust that you are) I'll happily attempt to forward your CV to someone relevant. email is in my profile. Can't hurt, right?

oh and if you know ruby well, include that as we might be able to help you.
When IE was at 98% they had almost no competition in the marketplace and the Internet was still just catching on. Netscape, through a combination of MS's actions and their own incompetence had become irrelevant. That was never a situation that could endure for long.

I don't disagree with your larger point. In my opinion as a web developer, IE7 and 8 are horrible browsers. My point is that Microsoft is more likely to rebound from this situation than to go out of business or become irrelevant.
I don't think it's useful to just go for raw numbers - it'll be skewed in ms favor with tons of big irrelevant corporations using it by default. How many big consumer sites use IIS/ASP.NET? How many startups? How many high traffic sites use it?

A web startup using IIS/ASP.NET is quite a rarity. I'd expect maybe 2% of startups? If that.

The fact the xBox doesn't even have a web browser should be reason enough for alarm.
What to do with people who aren't going to go away quietly
Care to give a concrete example of when you need an obj->obj mapping? I'm struggling to think of one.
You say free, do you mean free software too? Any plans to release the code or just SAS?
We have a three-tiered system. After elementary school, you go to either Hauptschule, Realschule or Gymnasium. Hauptschule is essentially useless, and Realschule does not guarantee literacy. After graduating Gymnasium pupils are usually aged 19 years. And university can take another 6 years.
There are other cases, like Italians that are usually educated and trained in Italy and then they go in the US. Our govern is really silly permitting this. The reason scientists go away from Italy after the initial years of research is that there is too little money for their equipment and for research in general.
Different examples of Shazam for image
Just as most languages presented with "foo"+12 would silently convert 12 to a string via the toString() method.

Most? The minority I'd expect. Others do things like

TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'dict' and 'int'
As of about 3 days ago there is a jQuery plugin for the Konami Code.

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/konami-code
No it doesn't. What I was saying is that the word of one person is not sufficient in such matters, no matter how famous the person. Hence there is (imo) no need to do homework on the popularity of the person. I could have done homework on the community opinion towards scrypt, however, I was commenting on the article (which did not cite any community opinions), not on the validity of scrypt. Therefore that kind of homework would not have been necessary in my opinion.
Wait what?

What makes freedom of expression a real right and not access to internet?

Who made you king of the universe?
Ask HN: Review my startup - findAlong.com
http://www.findAlong.com.

Often people work in teams to find information on the Web e.g. team of students working on a class project, members of a research group writing a paper, geographically distributed teams of programmers searching for help on forums, corporate research departments writing market surveys or reports, online shopping with family or planning a trip with friends. Typically people collaborate via ad-hoc means, such as sharing links over email or IM, or sharing tags on social bookmarking services.

FindAlong.com is a firefox plugin that enables teams of people to search together. You can start a "search session" with your team and start adding pages. Everyone is kept notified in real-time about searches performed by others in the group, pages added by a team member, comments on pages added by others, instant messages to team members etc. When "labels" are enabled within a session, each added page is automatically tagged with the query against which the page was added (avoiding duplication of work within team members) and helping organize the information.

You can also use the findAlong "search sessions" to organize your own research (and don't want to keep tagging each page with the same tag-name or invent awkward naming conventions to store relationships between tagged pages). You can email your sessions to friends, access them from the findAlong website or even post them as a bundle on delicious.

We are still tinkering with the UI, but it'd be great if people here can try out the extension and give us some feedback. You can also write to me directly at umar@mit.edu.

Thanks,
-Umar
Nearly every interesting programming problem is a bit over the top to you, at your current knowledge level. The point is to apply yourself, learn things as you go, research, and conquer the problem.

There are no cookie-cutter "noob" problems; there are problems whose solutions you can visualize in your head and see them happen, and problems that make you sit back and go "hmmmm". As you gather many technologies, more and more previously impossible problems begin to fall into the first category. This is what allows you, as an experienced programmer, to rule many application domains as boring and trivial. Even if you have never written a ticket ordering application for a concert hall, if you have done the most basic database application, you can pretty much visualize the solution :-)
I would agree with that. So here's what Lessig doesn't get now: he thinks that the money going into politics is the problem. It's not, it's just a symptom. The immense centralized power that Congress has to pick winners and losers, and to grant special favors, is the problem. As long as that power exists, no law can stop the money from flowing to the politicians (and their families). The force at work here is that special interests get a positive return on investment by supplicating to those in power, because those in power can give them what they want at the expense of others.
5 alət Vikipediya istifadəçiləriüçün
Ask HN: Good C++ Numerical Libraries
I'm starting my MSFE program this fall. Since C++ is heavily used on Wall Street, I have decided to take this summer to build a significant numerical library for financial related applications. Right now I am working with Quantlib and GSL to see how numerical routines are coded in C-style languages, but I am hoping to see a much broader code base as my project develops. I've come across several other numerical libraries, but I'm really not capable of judging yet what is considered to be a good library. I was hoping HN could point me to some well-constructed numerical libraries, hopefully coded in C++. I'll share my code when I get a significant amount of work done.

I thank any posters ahead of time.
Sorry I'm replying to my own comment here, I don't have to time to wait for the next exponential decay on the reply button showing up before I have to leave. I'm actually replying to axod's comment on this same level.

Well here's an example, I have an AJAX instant messenger app. Due to the protocol it talks on, multiple users may have the same name (a reasonable request, I think.) When a contact on a user's buddy list connects, the JS library in charge of talking to the server passes an opaque ChatUser object (or whatever) to any registered callbacks. So, I write a second set of JS stuff to manage the GUI, like the window for the buddy list, etc., and register it to receive the callbacks from the protocol manager. When I get a user that connects, for example, I should probably create an html span with that user's name and away status in the div that holds the buddy list.

Now, when a buddy changes his/her away state, the protocol manager will tell the registered callbacks that a ChatUser has changed status (or you can register for a callback on the ChatUser object itself, either works.) We need to change the status message in that user's span. But how do you find the span we need to modify? The ChatUser object is mostly opaque except for a few documented calls we can make on it (getName, getStatus, etc). Setting new properties on it is probably a bad idea, since we don't know what the original library is going to be doing with it.

In another language you can just associate the span's identity with the ChatUser through a map or dictionary. But you can't associate based on identity in JS, so you're left setting some crazy property on the ChatUser instance and hoping it doesn't collide or cause problems. We can't base it on the ChatUser's name, because what if there are multiple Joe Browns in the contact list?

It's a contrived example, but I hope it illustrates the importance of associations. There are multiple workarounds for this situation. But they aren't elegant, which is why I think JS sucks :]
Microsoft might own a 30% of the web server market share, but that makes them just a glorified tool vendor. A far cry from Microsoft's earlier potential as humanity's gateway to the "digital age". So they created a popular web framework, wooptidoo, and so has every 2cent PHP developer.
What's happening to Britain - women imprisoned for telling son she loves him
Is Information Visualization the Next Frontier for Design?
Writing a Perl 6 blogging app in 90 minutes
What differentiates this dating site from others?
"Microsoft’s entry into a market previously meant imminent death of any other players, but now it’s usually a source of comedy for the tech press."

As always, a sad end for the bully.

Geeks have never and will never tolerate bullies, ever.

Progress can not be caged and tamed, no matter how much money is spent on locks and chains.
Dedending code generation
How MicroPublishing Is Killing The Nuances of Knowledge
He also wrote a more recent one called JPod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jpod which is more about a cubicle farm environment than startup.
Some stats about Microsoft's current market position:

* Microsoft holds almost 90% of the operating system market share http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-shar...

* MSN Messnger is the most popular IM client in the world, 60% market share http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2006/04/3557.ars

* Internet Explorer is still the most used browser, 65%+ market share http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qp...

* Microsoft Office is still the most used Office suite (95%+ market share?)

* XBox is selling great and they are taking a market leader position http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jan09/01-05XBo...

* Hotmail is the most used web-email with 250 million users+ (GMail does not have 100 million yet) http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/metrics/email-statist...

* Microsoft are a big player in web-backend market. IIS and ASP are catching up with Apache http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/04/06/april_2009_web_...

* .Net has the largest market share amongst developers http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=.net%2C+java%2C+c%23%2C+ru...

* Even in one of the biggest financial crisis, Microsoft still makes shit loads of money (almost $15 billion in revenue for Q1 2009) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/23/microsoft-rev...

Taken from http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19446
why is this being downmodded? Am I incorrect in some fundamental way? then enlighten me!
Pick the project closest related to your hobbies
I think everyone (except maybe self-interested immigration lawyers) thinks the current system in the US is broken.

I think there are two extremes, and the US is inconsistently taking pieces of each.

In the United Arab Emirates (UAE, which contains Dubai, ...), there is a fairly open work visa policy for anyone with either enough capital ($50-100k) to set up his own business, or with a job offer paying at least $1-2k/mo for white collar positions (there is also the borderline-slavery $100-500/mo construction industry, but I think that is basically a separate issue). There is no pretense, outside banking and government, that local nationals need to be given first shot at a job.

Then, you have countries with citizenship or permanent residency-track-only immigration programs. (I think Canada's program is like this, and some other commonwealth nations.) You don't NEED to become a PR or citizen if you qualify, but almost all work visas qualify toward the PR/C process.

The main downside of the UAE system is that skilled people feel very little long-term attachment to the place. e.g. there are non-resident indian families who have lived for generations in UAE, but who are not permanent residents, although they control important businesses.

The US has a weird hybrid system, where most green cards, allocated by country and with preference toward reuniting families, go to people who have external reasons to want to stay in the US permanently (family, where they came from was worse, etc), and are generally economically non-productive. We give temporary L1/H1B/etc. visas to the economically productive, disincenting them to stay long term.

Basically, the US system is backward -- we should be trying to keep the people who are economically valuable, as they bring net value into the economy, and would allow us to increase the number of immigrants. We should have liberal short and medium term visit visas, etc. for family and tourist and other non-productive immigrants.
World's Wildest Roller Coasters
I would not dismiss Microsoft that easily, they are still a dominant force in software world and probably will be for a long time to come. Maybe they just lack focus here and there, which comes along having battles on so many fronts as they do have. Microsoft is a gigantic battleship with lots of bad and good stuff, for example Microsoft is a way to go if you want to be at the bleeding edge of 3D research these days, and that is just one very small segment of what they do - and lead in.
I could say the same thing about any Linux stack. Do you have any stats for that 2%, because my gut tells me 98%?
Multi-processor support coming for Firefox
Wireless spectrum: A hidden natural resource
Drawing Inspiration From Music
http://www.research.att.com/~bs/C++.html#libraries

Also, __the__ templates books is very useful for several tricks for squeezing performance: http://www.josuttis.com/tmplbook/

HTH
Non-fiction but I love "Showstopper" about Dave Cutler and Windows NT 1.0.

There's a great little story in there about a developer's months-long struggle to draw a Window onscreen for the first time from scratch. I loved the descriptions of how they coded up everything from bare metal. As you'll see, Dave Cutler is one of those rare firebrands.
Web users skeptical about paying for content
This a good introduction, but Douglas Crockford's A Survey of the JavaScript Programming Language [http://javascript.crockford.com/survey.html] is shorter and more detailed — and a perfectly adequate introduction if you already know other programming languages.
Los Angeles defense attorney
Los Angeles defense attorneys are also called as attorney at law. They are legally qualified to prosecute and defend the rights of their clients. Once Los Angeles defense attorney becomes a member of the bar association he is eligible to file legal proceedings and argue cases in any of the state courts.
the girls were adequately treated

Did you even read the Wikipedia link you cited? The one which says this:

Conditions in the Lowell mills were severe by modern American standards. Employees worked from five am until seven pm, for an average 73 hours per week. Each room usually had 80 women working at machines, with two male overseers managing the operation. The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth.

About 25 women lived in each boardinghouse, with up to six sharing a bedroom. One worker described her quarters as "a small, comfortless, half-ventilated apartment containing some half a dozen occupants"...

Women were also given opportunities to attend concerts and lectures, in addition to experiencing city life. Still, at least one observer reported that most women worked so that a male relative could obtain an education. "I have known more than one to give every cent of her wages," she writes, "month after month, to her brother, that he might get the education necessary to enter some profession."

Yeah, I guess this is more than adequate by the standards of a slave. Which is exactly Chomsky's point -- and the point of the contemporary writers and labor organizers which he is citing:

The Lowell girls' organizing efforts were notable not only for the "unfeminine" participation of women, but also for the political framework used to appeal to the public. Framing their struggle for shorter work days and better pay as a matter of rights and personal dignity, they sought to place themselves in the larger context of the American Revolution. During the 1834 "turn-out" or strike – they warned that "the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us,"...
I'm sure your mother would love to hear "sorry, I don't recognize Mother's Day today". ;)