skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yay! Finally I've been waiting for this for a long time.

I can finally get rid of some spaghetti code: goto emulation via while loops.

Yes, it's not often you need goto, but sometimes you do.
Anyone have an idea of where he's getting the figure for the number of employees at Google? He says 10,000, but Wikipedia[1] has it at 20k.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Google&oldid=2...
Rather goto 1980
Why? PHP is not any worse or better than any other language.

You can have bad programmers in any language - PHP just has lots of them because it's a popular language, but there is nothing wrong with the language itself.
I understand why C and C++ have goto statements (as well as other older languages). But to actually "introduce" goto's in a language that didn't have it or need it, making it even possible to write such horrible code is, in my opinion, pointless and worthless. It promotes illegible and bad code in general.
US work visa applications dry up (TARP, economy reduce H1B demand)
Anyone knows where's the PHP core team blog/site (if there's such team)?
PHP will never fully be utilized as an OO language because it's a stupid idea to write web pages with an OO language.

Web pages are just not suited to OO. Encapsulation can be done via functions - adding OO to it gets you nothing except longer code.

Making things more complicated does not make them better.
Except, of course, when the guy called and asked why he was banned.
The Cure for iPhone Envy: The story behind the doubleTwist ad
Sweet! Hope they implement COMEFROM next.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM
If they didn't do either of these things, I would find fault in their argument, but lucky for Google, they have.

So you're letting them off on a technicality then.
"If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

After edit: 2007 article from Scientific American about this interesting idea:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=malaria-flo...
I once used that a lot on my C64. Made sense back in 1982 and in limited cases, makes sense today.
It rather depends on all the information you know about before the interview(what do they use, what kind of questions did they ask in the phone screen, what do you know about the company). If it is for a specific language position I typically read the books I have for the lang. Practice problem solving techniques (something along the lines of prag. prog.'s code katas.)
In principle I think it's fine, but from the story it sounds like the decision-making process was busted.

What I've found is that companies that live or die by data don't have better arguments, necessarily, they just have different arguments.

At the end of the day it's about someone making a decision and taking responsibility for it. Sometimes forward momentum and the feelings of your employees are more important than minute details like that.

The story was more about Marissa Meyer's ego and how she uses the data-driven process at Google to frustrate her internal enemies, IMO, and less about the specific fact that they tested 41 shades of blue.

Personally I'd just make a decision and get on with it. If, for whatever reason, we thought the shade of blue would really, really matter you can always test it latter.

The risk of being data-driven is that you wind up in a world of Cartesian uncertainty. Do I really know ANYTHING? What if this thing I don't think matters really DOES matter? Doesn't that mean I should test every detail no matter how small?

Anyhow, these are issues you have to grapple with when you commit to being data-driven.

There's no simple answer, although it's easy for Google to justify testing every single thing because they have a gargantuan amount of traffic and even an improvement of a fraction of a percent could mean millions of dollars in revenue won or lost.
Clojure Macro Design - by example
By that logic would it be acceptable for a government to not inform citizens of the laws which they are bound by in order to prevent them from finding loopholes? Yeah, I know we're talking about a corporation and not a government, but I just want to put this in a different perspective.

Opacity is not the solution and neither is a policy of permanently banning customers at the first sign of trouble. Besides, a customer gaming the system by barely operating within the rules is still following the rules. Of course, he or she may be in complete violation of the spirit of the rules, but it's technically not a violation. It's likely a flaw in rules.

I'm well aware that there are lots of people out there who are looking to take advantage of the system, but when Google goes around banning anyone who violates a rule or operates on the fringe without any kind of appeal process they're bound to catch someone who just made an honest mistake.
Live feed of Apple App Store downloads (The App Store Wall)
Ask HN: Kindle DX - Technical Books.  Would you buy?
I'm curious what your thoughts are. With DRM free titles from pragmatic programmers, etc. Im thinking about buying one. Only if the PDF support enables it to display tables properly. One portable device that enables me to carry around a ton of books for $500 doesnt sound like a bad idea to me.
If it means that to me and everyone else who uses the word in the same way, how can it not "mean that?" Because that's not what's in the dictionary? Because that's not what someone who lived 100, 50, 25 years ago would have meant when they said it?

I don't buy it. Language is defined by its usage, not the other way around. If I say "actionable" and everyone understands what I mean by it -- yourself included, if only begrudgingly -- then what does it mean if not the thing which everyone understands?
Funny how they take the pain to provide the page using HTTPS and then this.
The first user contributed note on that page:

<?php
wtf:
echo 'For real!?';
echo 'Srsly!?';
goto wtf;
?>

Heh.
No. Because their API exposes an explicit ordering of the IDs - there is a sinceID: parameter.
Many of the lost accounts opted for the economy plan that did not include backup... they got what they paid for. No backup unless they took it upon themselves.
+1 for alerting me to a possible misinterpretation of my comment.

I was curious why there wasn't a real description of the solution to the bullying problem in the article, so I followed the trail back to the originator. Turns out he's a bit entrepreneurial in using the model of business to bring his solution to the masses, and probably (I hope) allow him to better refine the solution as he goes. I'm trying to do the exact same thing.

What struck me is that it seems plausible to me --and I'm fantasizing here-- that this story was suggested/planted/encouraged by his company as a PR move. This is what we should all be doing, and if he did it then he did it very well.
I would argue that effectively having roughly 3,000 keywords is a problem of the language itself.

And, saying, "PHP is not any worse or better than any other language" is saying that all languages are equal. Which, having worked in a number of languages over the years, including PHP, I know to be false. PHP is worse than many languages, and better than many for some classes of problem. It's just silly to say that all languages are equal.
Google CEO says looking to buy smaller firms
I just hope I remember when friday night comes along.
Ask HN: Protecting your identity with domain registration?
I am considering starting a controversial (but legal) website that might annoy some powerful people.

I would like to register a domain name and keep my identity private. I would also like a registrar who will protect my identity and domain in case they receive a threatening but baseless take-down notice. (Hence, not GoDaddy.)

Does anyone have any recommendations?

Declan McCullagh on CNet recommends gandi and directnic (http://bit.ly/qCoDX). Gandi, however, reveals your full name for .com registrations.

DirectNic looks good. They say they will only reveal your information in the case of a court order. Except, a) people have complained about their domain sniping (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150592) and b) DirectNic writes "(Contact records are modified to directPRIVACY within an hour after successful registration)". Doesn't that mean there is an hour where my full name is available on DNS? In that case, can't people determine my name using historical DNS records?

Do people have other recommendations for registrars that are good at protecting your privacy?
Not having goto's is not going to help you in the slightest from bad programmers.
Written in Notepad, don't shoot me:

enum action { Shift, Read};

action A = Read;
Token tok;

while (tok != END)

{

if(A == Read) tok = gettoken();

if(A == shift(tok)) A = read;

else if(A == reduce(tok)) A = shift;

else if(tok == END) return ACCEPT

else return ERROR;

}

--EDIT--

Awww, no indentation support in HN.
There is no monopoly on deftness.
It'd be nice to sign another two year contract for the subsidized price. I am interested to see the new componets and actual processor speed of the new device. I also want Nike+ so I may be willing to put down the additional money but I definitley don't want too.
I take it your test of language quality is Turing completeness?
I got my first job without any connections. Saw an ad and applied and get through the interview. If you see the job description and feel that you can do that job perfectly most of the time it should not be a problem
"Why? PHP is not any worse or better than any other language."

False. Not all languages are created equal, and PHP is on the shittier end of the spectrum.
Does anyone here think that this is an easy way to get subscribers for an app?

I mean, the lack of an anonymous or guest account, as well as the requirement of all that info, never makes me feel to try the app out.
I think you may be confusing me with the author of the article; I never said lava tubes were safer.
I am not in a position to offer advice on what is safe for you specifically. However, Wikileaks uses GoDaddy as their registrar, and they're still around.
I believe you can prefix your lines with two spaces to get <pre> tags.

while (1) {
print "yay";
}
But how does that accomplish a 130 MP? What's special about a scanner vs a camera that lets it do that?
Although you raise some valid questions, a legal staffer's 'low blow' in a court is not commensurate with the policy of the company. Our adversarial court system unfortunately rewards such tactics, and it's not like there was a board meeting in Mountain View to establish the paralegal's courtroom decision tree.
And/or a bigger link to the "FREE! ::: 1 board, unlimited users ::: sign up". I doubt most folks are going to whip out their credit cards based on a rotating homepage image.
Your acknowledgement that Outlook is a behemoth seems to coincide with Outlook being a major part of the real world.
I've gotten two jobs that way. My first job out of school, and 7 years later when I was laid off. Most of my jobs, however, have come through personal contacts with other engineers.
PHP does not have 3000 keywords. It has an ordinary number, and the rest are functions - basically the standard library.

You are confusing the language and the library. And for that matter the library is not bad either, it does however have a few poorly named legacy functions.

> It's just silly to say that all languages are equal.

Sorry, I wasn't really trying to say that. I meant "loosely typed procedural languages" not "any other language".

You pick the language the matches what you are doing, there is nothing inherent about PHP that makes it bad.
i think the point that was trying to be made is that PHP has its uses. use it where it best fits to solve the problem. just like any other language.
I made 1K in a month with CJ/adCenter arbitrage about a year ago. But I felt pretty spammy, then I saw the Jason Calcinis speech at Affiliate Summit and thought he was on point in regards to adding value. I'm still trying to figure out that part. :)
First thing: great, there are indeed too many users for whom Outlook is the email interface.

However, who doesn't Google try and improve the very poor UI of Gmail first? There's no vertical view (humans find reading short columns easier than wide lines), no message body preview, Google calendar is invisible, the whole thing seems quite ghetto when compared even to Hotmail.
I mostly agree, but a few points...

Governments don't have the right to refuse service that corporations do. I'm fine with corporations improving the experience of everyone but those who consider how nearly to approach 'pick a link' text, but it might be nice if an independent arbiter could determine if these bans actually follow the spirit of the rules before enforcing them.

Google has restored accounts that have been wrongly disabled. The length of time that it takes to do this does seem unbearable.
And Google makes this pretty easy because your home directory and all of your work lives in the cloud.
The full thread, if you prefer: http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/...
And what would you like to change in PHP?

Right now - what would you change. Keep in mind it's a loosely typed procedural language - that's not going to change.

Given that, what would you change?
Predicting Politics
Really? So back up the statement - tell me exactly what's bad about PHP.

And as I said before, it's a loosely typed procedural language, so don't try to compare it to a functional one. Within that type of language, what's bad about PHP?
Even people you don't like have rights.
http://namethis.com/name_this
I hope (read: have no doubt) they will release an API of sorts to let people integrate this with their own sites.

Just looking at Google's properties, it would be totally cool to have this integrated with Blogger, projects hosted on Google Code, actual Google API docs, etc. I'd also love to see a system like Google and Facebook use for letting people edit localized strings in their UIs.
What's the context of the violence?
Oh, common. Are we talking about the language that allows run-time renaming of the variables ? I mean if you have that then adding a goto hardly qualifies as "too bad".
I would simply stop being frustrated about this and delay your release for 3.0. Then you can simply use the parental controls / age rating to prevent this kind of review bs.
Features that PHP is missing and would be very difficult to implement in use code include continuations, lexical closures, macros, a sane type system, multimethods, a metaobject protocol, and many others. Why confine yourself to the tools of a 1950s-era programmer when it's 2009?

(PHP isn't even very good at "web stuff", although the frameworks try to improve this situation.)
He's saying that the market suffers because of a lack of competition

Huh? What lack of competition? The post is about the competition.

this article seems to sort of be leading towards that sentiment

He's referring to stand-alone devices, not other smartphones.
You mean like this: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/904features/ ? Or this: http://www.kubuntu.org/news/9.04-release ?

P.S. FreeBSD and some linuxes don't exactly target the same kinds of users as apple. You know, the typical FreeBSD or Debian user probably cares about which version of gcc is default, and probably couldn't care less about photo editing software. Their PR seems adequate to me :D
Unless the goal is to communicate to small-timers that picking and publicizing legal fights with them will cause them to go nuclear.
They don't care. They don't have to. They are the search company.

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml
Approaching the limit on recommender systems
If you want to paint using crayons, that would be correct.
Asshats have rights too.
This is the amusing irony of PHP. It's a programming language designed to make generating HTML and interfacing with the web easy, but it's actually very hard (compared to other languages) to do either of these things.
OMG! My friendly little country, Norway, is being ranked as number 7.
I'd be happy to help, please drop a line to aaron.blohowiak@gmail.com so I can follow up with you.
The most significant military assistance that Europe receives from the US comes through the network of US bases throughout the Continent.

Because of those bases, many of the European security problems of the past two centuries have disappeared. Britain no longer has to worry about a united Continent attacking them, as happened under Napoleon and the Nazis. Germany is no longer concerned about being a major power surrounded on all sides by potential enemies. And the entire continent is protected from expanding external powers, such as the USSR during the Cold War and the early Arab and Ottoman Empires.
This comment extends further into the realm of speculation than the original post. The article doesn't even mention Apple's understanding of encryption, let alone specifics like algorithms and key sizes.

The post only speculates about the meaning of Apple's carefully worded feature description, the scope of the device encryption, and whether it's primary intent is to enable the remote wipe feature.

With regard to four digit pins - the strength and length of a password is hardly immaterial to security if it is being used to derive or encrypt the key. This is especially true if the wipe needs to be triggered remotely. Storage of the key on the network or MobileMe would present a host of other issues that I suspect Apple would want to stay away from.
Low court precedents are not binding.
It is amazing that people are willing to sink thousands of hours into programming around PHP's problems (probably without noticing) because they are afraid to run "cpan -i Some::Modules" and cut-n-paste a FastCGI configuration into their web server's config file.

Ease of deployment is nice, but deploying other languages is not much harder, and it's significantly easier to actually write a reliable application.
power users

I am perpetually at a loss for what this term means. On the one hand you're describing these features as "basic" but on the other they're for "power users". Is that not a contradiction?
>that his position was not tenable.

He actually got his answer and got to face his accuser in court. So his position was tenable.
I'm over my head here, but this is the naive idea that I imagined -

You could add two keywords like /notice/ and /keep/. If a parent class's function definition of foo has /notice bar/, overrides of foo could allow the new class to inherit bar with /keep bar/, or warn if neither a keep statement or an override are present.
For all those who want to calculate when is 12am EDT in your local time, go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ where you got a count down.. (6 am saturday here in Switzerland)
Drama & Opera
Saying "somebody else would sucker these chumps if I didn't" is not a moral defense for doing it.

I'm not saying they're not within their rights to do so, I'm just saying it's not something a non-evil company would do.
You can use fake whois data for a few days. It doesn't matter. Some time ago i reported a domain to ICANN that did not have a single valid looking whois field. The registrar (Melboure IT) did nothing and after a year or so the same data was still present.
Already, we're to the point where if you built a universe off of the standard model and added some hacks to cover the cases where we know it doesn't work, you could probably build a correct-enough simulation to support life.

You really think we even understand .1% of all there is to know about this universe?
Cisco Developer Contest: the ten finalists
Do they have the right to breach contracts?
I am excited about the idea of this, but I am still on the fence about making the plunge. $500 is really expensive, and there are very few technical books available directly through Amazon. Several publishers do have PDF now, but most seem to be avoiding a direct relationship. I am not sure if I can find a large enough % of the books I want to buy to justify the initial amount.
There's a chicken and egg situation when it comes to features like MMS, copy/paste, and search - the number of users is directly correlated with its usability and discoverability. Sure, there is a demographic that will never use the feature in any case, but IMHO the fact that many phones have these features but are barely used is more a testament to the difficult UI than the notion that some people just don't want it.

I agree that Apple has sparked a renaissance of sorts in the cell industry - a do or die if you will. This is good for everyone - BlackBerry is getting better every day, Nokia is woefully behind, MS is still twiddling their thumbs, and everyone else is basically a non-player (including Android, for the time being anyway).
No concept of "browsing" SMB networks exists in PF.

That's great, because that's never actually worked for me anyway; I always have to type the IP address I know the share is on. Even then, if I'm on wireless (but not on 100MB ethernet, oddly), I only get one use out of it: if I close that Finder window or don't use it for a bit, the share is closed to me in fact, even though it appears to still be there until I try to use it.

The whole thing is terribly buggy and must be approached in an exact manner (FIRST "eject" any visible shares, THEN cmd-K to bring up the SMB window, type the IP (no hostnames, even though ping, etc works!), wait for about two minutes (literally), then immediately do the auth window when it comes up -- waiting a bit will require restarting the process -- and then immediately get or put whatever you need...). I used to blame Windows for this before the local Windows admin demonstrated that no local Windows machine had this problem. :)

Sorry, a bunch of irritation just leaked out, there.
Agreed. IANAL and I don't know anything about CA small claims court or what grounds the appeal was on, but I would have asked the judge to not allow that evidence. Usually you can't present evidence on appeal that you could have presented in the original case. If they refused to provide that evidence in the original case, you could argue they waived their right to present it in the future.

It defeats the whole purpose of small claims court if large corporations can just ignore the original case and lose and then appeal and bring in lawyers to put on their real case in front of the appeals court.
Bug Report

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Crash global economy.

2. Have nothing on hand other than large stockpile of gold bars.

What is the expected output?

Gold will magically transmute into food, water, ammunition and shelter.

What do you see instead?

Gold remains inedible, non-potable, unsuitable for use as ammunition and too heavy for use as shelter-building material.
Yep. Bertrand Serlet's comments on stage pretty much summed up Apple's attitude: they love the Finder in Leopard. They either don't know or don't care about just how much the Finder has really lost, nor do they focus on major UI issues in the Mac OS X Finder (that have been documented extensively in many blogs and articles), issues that create daily frustration or confusion for many users.

I'd bet that even this Put Back feature will be a poor imitation of the old one, just like everything else. Scrollable stacks that can dive into folders? Please, Mac OS 8.5's pop-up windows were brilliant, scrollable windows that could do everything else that Finder windows could do, and it doesn't even look like Stack pop-ups can be resized.