skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dunno about mobiles, TBH,

But I 100% agree that it is surprising that the likes of Virgin (my ISP) haven't just added a tick box in their router setup. Even it its not perfect, its something they could point to, to shut up the nannies. And of course over time, they can just improve or adjust the filtering to get it as good as the nannies want. It could easily be a simple update to the router.

Might also demonstrate how hard it actually is. But at least it would be a simple option for those who want it.
Canonical Launch $32 Million Ubuntu Phone Crowdfunding Campaign
On planet Earth, Where You're Born Has a Huge Impact on How Far You'll Go In Life.
Save the lecturing, you don't know if he needs legal advice. Maybe he has already gotten legal advice.
Not only that, the real problem isn't being noticed today. The real problem is how much shit they have on you when they do eventually notice you. After they pull the string on a US Attorney's back and point her in your direction, she will use every scrap of data available to make as ridiculously overblown case a case against you as she can. Which problem these sorts of protests seem to make worse.
Scientists have no need to "defend" global warming. They just need to keep doing the science.

Oh, but they want to be making policy, not science.

As an aside: I get the feeling from your comment that you might not be aware that Michael Crichton is dead.
This is how you do a security incident disclosure.

I hope Apple is taking notes.
Personally the only point of contention with FP vs OOP is immutability, or more directly managing state. The distinction between 'simulating people behavior' and 'measuring people behavior' is probably intentionally vague to spur the imagination, but it's quite apt.

Many languages implement multiple flexible looping/filtering structures to discourage shoving everything into for/while loops (which are susceptible to confusing and messy continue, break, goto, yield statements strewn about). Furthermore the rationale behind Clojure[1] is stateful objects are a new kind of spaghetti code, and managing state across scopes requires breaking mental boundaries.

[1] http://clojure.org/rationale
"If we don’t reach our target then we will focus only on commercially available handsets and there will not be an Ubuntu Edge."

That makes so much more sense to me that I'm having a hard time understanding why Canonical would even attempt to design and manufacture their own handset.
Maybe because to most of us Dropbox and Airbnb isn't even close to being as annoying as Google?

(som of us where enthusiastic google fanboys earlier.)
Good lord, it's actually working! Full steam ahead, boys!

If only we'd done this a decade or two ago. How about some reevaluation of granted patents?

edit: The original title, "Joel Spolsky, patent killer", was better :/
Wow - crowdsourcing the removal of ludicrous patents. This could be the killer app of StackExchange. Well done!
Yumcoin – Sell your digital creations for Bitcoins
They fail at even the most basic stuff too.

Like how when you launch a new app on the App Store, for the following 6-8 hours users get random errors ("not available on store", "not available in this country", sporadically missing from search, etc) when they try to download it as it propagates through the app store CDN. This even affected the recent OS X updates launched on the Mac App Store. Imagine if Amazon CloudFront worked like that!

And imagine if Amazon had to shut down their whole site when they updated one product like the Apple Store Online.
Not just command line apps. Any time you need to deploy on multiple machines, Go saves you a lot of trouble.

At work we use primarily `buildout` [1] to deploy Python apps with complex dependencies. It is rather slow and fragile. Additionally, PyPi and various external repositories are not very reliable, and we ended up setting up local mirrors. Nevertheless, the process is not very pleasant.

We are experimenting with Go in some smaller projects, and so far the experience is great! We can build on a development machine (OS X) with all the dependencies version controlled (using git-subtree) along with our code, and cross-compile a static binary for Linux for deployment. Deploying is simply copying the binary to the production machines (usual configuration management is done via Puppet).

Besides, Go can efficiently make use of multiple cores (remember to set GOMAXPROCS correctly), and we can just deploy one instance of an app per server, unlike one instance per core as in Python's case (I know there's multiprocessing, but it's bad for operation and management). This greatly reduces memory overhead if the app is big (e.g. consumes a couple hundred of MB upfront and you have 32 cores per machine = a few GB's memory is wasted).

Only problem is that Go's 3rd-party libs are not as comprehensive as Python's yet, and many packages we rely on do not have mature/reliable counterparts in Go. So we are still using Python for our core stuff, but smaller projects that do not require many external packages can be done in Go elegantly.

[1]: http://www.buildout.org/en/latest/
Dummy question:

"Dual LTE antennas"

Does this also mean double the radiation?
Screw that reasoning. The NSA wants 100% transparency into everybody's comms, I demand a hell of a lot more transparency into their methods.

I am funding them afterall, and there are far more useful things that can be done with that money. We have a completely failing country in all facets aside from the military industrial complex. All military funding needs to be drastically cut.
The canadian "citizen and immigration" service is seriously understaffed (thanks, Mr. Harper!). Some consequences of this:

* It currently takes more than two years in average to process a citizenship request.

* The CIC stopped accepting any new application from canadian citizens or permanent residents to sponsor their parents or grandparents for permanent residency.

So, this all sounds good in paper, but Im skeptical about how well it will work in reality.
Ask HN: Standing desks?
I'm setting up a home office and considering a standing desk over a traditional sit-down one. The benefits seem obvious, but at the same time it seems difficult to get long-term work done if you're standing.

What's your experience with a standing desk?
College Student Needs Your Help Creating Hearing Aids for Low Income Families
Several titles probably did it (I only know of one for sure) but it does not mean it's any good technique.

You see, on PS3 GPU there are no pixel shader constant registers. This means you need to patch shader code if you want any alterations in your pixel shader. A naive approach, with patching on CPU when submitting every primitive, is horrendously slow because the CPU sucks at moving large amounts of data. A slightly faster approach, using the GPU DMA, is still unbelievably slow, because even though the GPU moves large amounts of data very quickly it takes a lot of time to switch between pushing triangles to copying mem ranges and back. Luckily, on the PS3 there are also SPUs, pretty good at moving large amounts of data and having no penalty for doing so. Patching shaders on SPUs is so fast you forget about it. Also very easy to write.

So the mind boggles when you see people using GPU patching and, to somehow save peformance, do some complicated scheme with occlusion culling via SPU.
Then your next big thing is (especially) Scala
It would certainly be great for innovation. For example, we already know it's possible to create benzodiazepines with similar effect profiles to alcohol, but that do interesting other things, like have a limit on intoxication that doesn't allow a person to become intoxicated to physically dangerous levels. There are alternative alcohols that have less toxic effects on the body as well.

Synthetic marijuana, properly made, could mitigate the unpleasant side effects such as apathy and paranoia through optimizing the cannabinoid balance. Hopefully, we'd even find the holy grail: anti-pain and anti-anxiety drugs that aren't physically addictive.

One great side effect is that research into palliative care would be greatly expanded. The military applications of new pain and anxiety medications would be massive as well.

The harm that we could prevent, not only from ending the narco-wars that are funding our enemies and tearing apart our neighbors to the south, but from a flood of new research and investment is staggering.
> And I hate the "I can't imagine how to do this, so it's not possible" argument.

I can imagine how to do it. But I also know that 99.9% of people don't.

> > with the usual suspects--Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, etc...

> Nobody in my house runs those.

That's very unusual, and you'll have to agree.

Let's assume that you are really doing so much that AV is completely moot. You're still being reckless by giving people the impression that they can just uninstall it and continue doing what they were doing (i.e. using Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, etc.), and everything will be exactly the same.
Wealth redistribution is a term of art that has a meaning which isn't necessarily a negative.

In general, the problems with these programs is that they create dependency, and cannot be cut. When rough times come around, the first thing to be slashed are the citizen facing (and often job impacting) functions like street cleaning, police patrols and staffing at the city clerk's office.

As an example, in my US State, the Department of Transportation hasn't pruned trees and has reduced mowing at the roadside since 2009. The result? Traffic signs are obscured by branches (safety hazard), and the road drainage systems are going to be clogged by leaves and brush. This builds an implicit debt, as mowing grass and cutting trees is cheaper than rebuilding roads early and dealing with the human and financial costs of accidents. In the meantime, Medicaid spending automatically increases as much as 10-15% a year.
I hereby dub you, "Beer Prince". ;p
edit: "Scotch Prince". There, fixed.
It doesn't matter; you should assume your password is lost.

Follow their advice: "we advise you to change the password for your user name."
I'd be more concerned about the clear attempt to discredit you by implying that you'd configure your phone to buzz when an email comes in.
I want this. I already pay an Ubuntu premium for System76 computers. Anyone who has the Dell dev edition does the same.

But, Canonical, can you please extend the $600 price point for at least a month? This sudden 24 hour sale is too much of an impulse buy.
Yeah, as great as Github... Oh wait!
Functional programming works great for processing data - you don't want to change the data, and there isn't a lot of state. You largely write various transforms and filters, which is right in FP's wheelhouse.

On the other hand, simulation is quite state-full, often has tons of little details that you don't want to expose to the world (encapsulation), the thing that you are simulating usually has a collection of varying behaviors that you can represent via polymorphism or composition, they have attributes, and the 'engine' is often easier to write if you use dynamic(virtual methods)/static(generics)/duck polymorphism to get your things to do their, well, thing.

Which is not to say that either is undoable or really hard in the other paradigm, but if I am simulating something I am often thinking of 'objects' and doing things to them; the OO paradigm helps you program about that in a very expressive way. Ditto for FP and functional programming - I'm thinking about filtering and transforming data.

That is just my view of the author's article, with a caveat. I've seen terrible, beastly simulations done in OO that basically thought that single inheritance is how you spell OO. A single type hierarchy bites you so hard: 'Oh, I'm make everything a widget with draw/eat/process/whatever methods'. Then requirements change, and widgets in this subtree need to do something you thought only widget in that other subtree would do, next requirement has you needing to reflect on who can do what, and so on. You end up with a huge Blob object at the top of your hierarchy, or you endlessly end up with huge blocks of RTTI/reflection to figure out what kind of thing you are dealing with, or otherwise try to work around the problem that the world is not easily decomposed into a single hierarchy.

In practice I find all of this terribly reductive. Need some small thing whose behavior varies in well defined ways? Use polymorphism. Have a bunch of stateful stuff that you need to keep track of? Encapsulation is nice. Want to perform some operation on a large collection of data? Look to transform(). Need to make a lot of inferences and conclusions? Perhaps logic programming will work there. Need to provide a framework where people can build larger systems? Hopefully you are using component or services based ideas. And so on. A programmer should have a bunch of tools handy, and use the best one for the job. On the other hand, just about every person I interview opines that we should inherit for re-use, and I silently despair.
Let's recall four standard reasons for a correlation of two variables:

(1) Coincidence. One rose over some time period, and the other also rose over the same period, despite being completely unrelated. (The world murder rate has been going down, and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been going up. This is a negative correlation.)

(2) A causes B. (Cigarette smokers display lung cancer at elevated rates)

(3) B causes A. (Cigarette smokers display lung cancer at elevated rates)

(4) Root cause. Some other phenomenon causes both A and B. (Children in homes containing books display intelligence at elevated rates)

This should be obvious, but arguing against option (2) doesn't mean arguing for option (3).
Circular dependencies ARE a problem with your architecture. You've got two modules that are strongly coupled. They should either be in one module or you should rethink things. It is impossible to need one without the other in that case, so including one without the other makes no sense, so just merge them.
I don't have numbers to back this up, but I strongly suspect your average hotdog cart sells more hotdogs per day than your average indie or solo game developer sells iPhone games per day.

A new street food vendor only competes with other food vendors in the area. A new game developer competes globally, against both established studios and hobbyists happy to work for free because it's fun. You have people who want to make games so badly they'll fight to get in, knowing fully it's low pay and long hours.

Any way you look at it, the reason game developer salaries are relatively low is because supply for the jobs is higher than the demand.

It's a bit silly to compare the two because the economics are so different (local, non-scalable product vs. global product with zero marginal cost), but I stand by my assertion that there's no inherent reason why game developers should earn more, on average, than food vendors.
Having lived in numerous countries as a foreign programmer (neither from the U.S or Canada), I can assure you that it is significantly easier to move to Canada than the U.S. Their highly skilled migrant program is a lot more friendly to... highly skilled migrants. In fact, most countries are.
Why is that really sad?

It's not sad that the conditions for a street food vendor are better, it's sad that the conditions for a game programmer are so bad.
I don't know how viable a crowd-funding campain can be for a smartphone.

1 year until delivery seems fair for the makers, but unfortunately the competition will during this time release new devices with better specs.

Looks cool though. Reminds me physically of the Motorola DROID RAZR.
Yeah, isn't that one of the things that ended up getting geohot in trouble with the PS3? They found an account where he had agreed to the TOS, thus putting him in violation of the same?
I did. The lead-in was too over-the-top and the advice unremarkable.
The dynamism and runtime reflection can be a performance killer. It only is a performance killer in most cases because the Ruby runtimes are still extremely simple as dynamic language implementations go.

Method dispatch in Ruby, for example, can for the typical case (where nobody redefines random methods on all your classes on a regular basis once initial startup has been done) be little more expensive than a C++ virtual member function dispatch, but this requires work to either cache (and invalidate) method lookups, or pre-building vtables (and waste a bit of memory as well as being prepared to propagate updates to them if methods are redefined) for known methods.

Inlining of code is also possible, for example, but requires more work to add "guards" to protect against less common patterns that are still valid.

99% of Ruby is reasonably simple to optimise well. The problem is that the 1% can change the whole world for you and force you to either be able to selectively detect what changes are made or throw out all your optimisations), and so to get fast Ruby implementations will either need to ask for guarantees from the developer (pragma's to promise you'll never alter Fixnum, even in eval() blocks, or flags to by default freeze all standard classes, for example), or they'll need to start employing all the dirty tricks in the book.

Thankfully, the Smalltalk, Lisp, Self and Javascript worlds, amongst others, have pioneered plenty of dirty tricks that'll do just fine (e.g. consider Polymorphic Inline Caches, pioneered in Self, I believe, that are now quite widely applied for dynamic languages)

I think we'll eventually head towards a bit of both: Optional ways of making the job easier, such as promising not to much with things we normally don't muck with anyway, combined with new meta programming libraries to remove the reasons for a lot of the eval() usage, that will allow implementations to make much better judgements about what can actually change (instead of assuming all bets are off after an eval()), and a large number of dirty tricks (in the form of caches + heuristics + guards in various variations, to be able to take fast paths most of the time and "just" fall back to slow code for pathological cases).
I don't see a reason this argument would apply to simulated rape but not simulated murder. A large number of people enjoy watching realistic simulated murder in movies, in TV, and in video games.

Your argument predicts that murder rates would rise after the arrival of the internet as people who enjoy simulated murder use online echo chambers to validate their belief that murder should be acceptable (it's highly unlikely that they are watching simulated murder for pleasure).

Except murder rates haven't risen since the arrival of the internet.

Why?
Of course they didn't build the SDK in less than a year. It's a pared-down version of what they use to create their own apps.
I'm more of a scotch guy, really :)
Giffgaff likewise default to "delicate sensibilities" mode. Of course, when I tried to access a grown-up site, I assumed it was broken, raised it on the forum. Trivial to resolve but IMO a bug not a feature.
Scalable Graph Computing ("The Contorted Graph")
> It's virtually impossible to run a Windows (or Linux, or Mac) installation with the usual suspects--Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, etc.--without being exposed to good old, non-targeted malware. Take into account that most of it is distributed from "good" sites, and "if I don't see it, it must mean there's nothing there" and "I never go to any risky sites" prove pretty silly.

Do you have more information about this? I wasn't aware that malware was just "floating" out in the ether. I have been staunchly in the camp of, "If you know what you're doing you can remain safe." but you seem convinced otherwise. Why?
I respect that such small charities are bigged up by royals. Who else would? They are important in a small way. Big celebs and politicians go for the big charities, knowing they will get great PR, and they do great.... Both the charities and the celebs. That's cool, but here are our royals looking out for the little guys. Well, frogs...

This is exactly one of the reasons I approve of them. Again, no bias, no selfish PR reason, they can just help out.
It's canadian dollars, right?
wtf? 20k a month just by selling 'shaobing'. This is just another shitty marketing 'news' for a MMO called "Yuan zheng"[1]
[1]http://yz.q1.com/
I'd say that this is actually pretty reasonable, especially if they'll consider your retirements account towards the $11K-30K reserves.

Almost anyone can be a founder in Canada now. Congrats Canada!
CyberPunk: Alternative Internet
if the Queen tried it on, she'd be deposed and paliament would select a new head of state.
Wow, lot of marketing speech from a platform targeted for geeks.

BTW: sapphire crystal is extremely heavy and shatter-prone compared to GG3, for example. There's a reason Corning makes so much money.
I just started using CouchDB for a Raspberry Pi-based maglock system for my coworking space. The replication feature is what initially pulled me. Looking forward to the improvements to the project.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (video)
What's a concrete example of (4) in this context that doesn't reduce trivially to (3)?
Tale of a $1000 Facebook Bug Bounty
Have you thought about making an "MVP" standing desk out of old soda cans/books and a board?
Cartoon Selfies and Twitter
i know that business taxes are relatively low, but what about personal incomes taxes? how will this affect having to pay double taxes (both us and canada). i believe you can write off the taxes you pay overseas, but you have to pay the difference in us taxes.
...aaaaand cloned :)
I think that’s why it is called an "experiment".
Does anyone really still want a phone you can plug into a monitor? This would have been a dream product back before broadband and wifi became ubiquitous, and before extra PCs became so cheap.

Nowadays, it seems like a much better design is to have multiple devices with different form factors that can access shared data via a cloud.

(unless this product is meant as an NSA-proof system, but I don't see that it makes a very convincing product for that use case either...)
I assume so, but the current exchange rate is 1.00 USD = 1.03 CAD, so it's more or less the same either way.
Congratulations to the stack exchange team for getting this going. It's an incredibly good idea, maybe you could patent it?
http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=29555