skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The standard http library was calling Close on my io.Reader. This is not expected behaviour when the interface clearly just takes an io.Reader (which exposes one and only one method Read).

So if I implemented my own object with a Reader interface and passed it to this HTTP library, could it find some other method on my object named Close() and it could call it?

Is it pure duck typing happening here, or is the HTTP library looking for a commonly-defined interface with documented semantics for Close()?
I don' see how using header will remove the need to fetch the resources, parse them and diff them. Maybe you'll do that less often, but you'll still do it a lot...
No year before 1973 was as hot as 1973.
These little teasers are starting to annoy me. Congratulations, you can twist C to be as unintuitive as you'd like it to be. But why would you write code like that to begin with? I don't care what value __ return -3 >> (8 * sizeof(int)); __ returns because no sane program anyone contributes to will have constructs like that.
No, what I (currently 64) have noticed is a swift reduction in unbroken-focus time. Unlike in my 20's and 30's, I have personal responsibilities, now, y'see.

We're not designed to preemptively multitask; I just crash my stack when I try. We can cooperatively multitask, but the context-switching has to planned ahead. Even then, interrupts are costly. Used to be there was nothing between me and putting in a sleepless weekend on a project except me and my fatigue, which enthusiasm overcame easily. Now I've got kids and elderly parents and they're not only interrupting, they're nonmaskable. Stack-crash, context-dump and a profound weariness from loss of momentum, next stop.

I love it when I can shove in the earplugs, unplug the phone and dive in on a new learning adventure -- I hunger for that, it's part of who I am. Those times when I can trust the world to handshake timeslices and mask interrupts are very rare these days, however. From the outside it might look like slower learning; from in here, it's that the learning seldom gets any runtime.
Good luck with getting anyone who isn't a nerd to do it!
I'm really not sure that getting humans to reliably use a relatively complicated and ultimately completely deterministic algorithm for password generation solves anything.

PassPhrases on the other hand work well, both in people being able to compose high-entropy, unique, site-specific phrases and playing to the strengths of human narrative memory.
How to actually defeat US government (2008)
I currently have 2 SIMs for 2 different Russian regions. Calls via local SIM are cheaper. Even for the same operator. And I think I have 5 or more abandoned SIMs for more regions I've been to. And this is a norm. I'm surprised the number is not higher.
Want to hire rails programmer for small project
I am looking to hire a rails programmer, someone who can work on a short scrum to add functionality to an app that I am building. I am tied up with another project at the moment and don't have time to figure out what to do what I need. I have an opportunity to test out the app on friends so I would like to get the functionality added soon. Specifically I need to add push functionality using Pusher or PrivatePub or something like that to a micropost app based on Hartl's tutorial. I also need functionality to search for posts by date created.
If anyone is interested in working on this small project please contact me at bwoodreid@gmail.com
The length of a day is not constant.
Show me a service that has static files as RSS :) no matter what a stat() is still more expensive than nothing
Not even close. You think middleware and trainings are a 5 billion dollar market?
Exactly. 100,000 "seconds", 20 "hours" (each hour = 5000 seconds), 50 "minutes" (each minute = 100 seconds). If you're gonna do it, something like that seems sensible. Easily divisible, neat, etc.

That said, I don't think the current system is too onerous, 60 is a nice number (thanks Sumerians), and when you bring leap seconds into it it has to be messy anyway, so what's the point? So it's more a thought experiment than anything.
Related: K-sec LCD watch for star travellers

http://blog.tokyoflash.com/2012/11/k-sec-lcd-watch-for-star-...
Same as hunting for/picking your own food or sending snail mail to tell things to people. It works, but is not very efficient! Efficiency opens the door for innovation and new behaviors.
I think it's more people than people think...

10% of people living in america are not citizens. 90% of people are. If their definition of 'foreign' is 'non-citizen' and they only have to be 51% certain that someone is foreign, that is a 49% error rate, which means (at a maximum) 90% of the people they have in their databases and are tracking are american citizens.

If they had to be 91% certain, that's a 9% error rate, and they would have a database that 52% are american citizens...
If you're unsure about Sheldon Brown's authority on bikes this sticker sums it up: http://images.ecdn.bigcartel.com/bigcartel/product_images/31...
In Go, a type doesn't have to declare that it implements an interface; it automatically satisfies an interface if it implements the appropriate methods. Most interfaces in Go only contain one method.

If a type has a Close() method, then it is a Closer. The code that tries to cast it to a Closer will succeed. So to answer your question, it doesn't matter what the semantics of your Close() method are, it will succeed solely based on the fact that your type has a method with that name.
Why not implement your own as well, for people who do not want to connect to another account?

What about google?
Federal Reserve 2013 July Beige Book
Php pecl memcached extension for MAMP 2.x
php pecl memcached extension for MAMP 2.x
> So if I implemented my own object with a Reader interface and passed it to this HTTP library, could it find some other method on my object named Close() and it could call it?

Yes, and that's what's happening here. It can try to convert your value to a value of type Closer, which is an interface that implements a method Close(), and it can use that method. This conversion will succeed if the value you pass in has a method Close() (taking no arguments) -- Go has a strong "loose coupling" philosophy; there is no "implements."

For example, you can do:

nfoo, ok := foo.(myCustomInterface)

where foo is any value. If foo implements myCustomInterface (indicated by ok being True), regardless of whether that interface is exported or not, or whether the person behind foo intended to implement it, then you will be able to call myCustomInterface's methods on nfoo. It's not exactly duck typing, but it does mean that taking a value implementing SomeInterface is no guarantee that you can only use the methods defined by SomeInterface.

See my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060627
It's probably your first reaction to try and sound like a big company, but personally I'd would avoid that if I could. Especially if it comes off unnaturally (which it appears to have done at least in this instance). In some cases you can play your small size as an advantage, at least for your first customers. Just as a single example, a small company can offer much more personalized customer service. For more about this, see the "Delight" section of pg's most recent essay: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Ask HN: A VDI service to give you pre-configured coding environments
Hi guys,

I have started off a VDI service (iVDI.com) and was wondering,

1. How would you feel if you could access the same Win 7 experience from your iPad, Android and other smartphones? You'll have the ability to use the same desktop from your home, office and even on-the-go via those interfaces.

2. How useful would it be for you guys if I can give you pre-configured environments with everything setup for different development needs?

Like having one image tailored for Android development with Eclipse and the Android SDK set up. A configuration set for iOS development with XCode and Developer Tools, an image for LAMP stack development complete with all the IDEs and tools/utilities, etc.
Your analysis points to why the authors analysis is flawed. He calculates the expected value of the option and says that this leaves the value of the stock options to be very small. What he neglects to mention is that the employee is also granted a 'real option' which is his right, but not obligation, to leave the company if it does badly. This 'real option' significantly increases the value of stock options because the employee can leave after one year (or less) in the case that the startup is not on track to succeed. This means the forgone salary is reduced in the down scenario. Google 'real options' or 'strategic options' for the maths behind how to price these, it's a beautiful mathematical theory.
This behavior is explicitly defined in the godoc for io. I don’t see why the author should be "stunned" by a function doing exactly what it says it does.
So choosing between

- Harvard dropout

- couple of Stanford grad students

- seasoned guy who started a major national bookstore chain

third sounds like a winner?
Scientists explain their processes with a little too much honesty (with photos)
I agree with the gist of the post, but there are some ways in which you can tip the scales in your favor:

- Get an offer where you get your options up front and the company reserves the right to repurchase them.

- Exercise your options immediately and file an 83b election. There will be no difference between fair market value and strike price, so your exercise-time tax liability should be zero. Obviously, this is easier if #options*strike_price is low.

- Look for a low strike price. If the seed round was convertible debt, the strike price may still be low.

- If you're trying to "go big or go home", look for a big gap between strike price and the price of preferred shares in the most recent round.

- Work at a company that is a qualified small business at the time you (fully, see above) exercise your initial grant, and hold your stock for five years. This can make any capital gains almost entirely tax free (see e.g. http://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/Tax_LF_CongressExtendsSmallB...)

I am _not_ a tax/finance professional, so remember to take these with a grain of salt!
Effective hiring is incredibly difficult, and "past work" is never a sure fire indicator of ones aptitude for your companies' needs. A person hiring needs to consider how a candidate will fit within a work environment and get along with the current team (an otherwise very nice and highly skilled person sometimes just doesn't mesh with the way a team likes to work, not out of unwillingness on anyone's part, but simply out of the fact that we all have habits).

Are they the sort of person that can hit the deadlines we need and doesn't mind the stress and extra hours involved?

Will they be comfortable with our business philosophy and practices?

What kind of outlook do they have on their career? What at this point in their life is important to them (career? kids? sailing around the world?)

Hiring is messy, mainly because it involves humans. Past work may be a good chaff filter, but it's by far not the only consideration to finding a good candidate for your needs.
We can't be sure, but it should be much easier to audit a small system like Pi, rather than an Intel processor that, above all, can be remotely patched.
Thanks--We'll definitely accept individual contributions before the fundraising period ends. We wanted to avoid staff at companies contributing individually instead of bringing institutional support. Flynn's long term success will depend on institutional adoption (not contributions), so forging strong relationships in that area now is important.

We're also considering different options e.g. Gittip vs traditional kickstarter-esque funding options with stickers and t-shirts. Currently there are 13 days on the clock, we'll post again when we're nearing deadline.

We'd be excited to hear any suggestions you have on how to balance individual and organization contributions and participation before then.

Thanks again for your support
Why your egg yolk is yellow
Interestingly, my state Department of Transportation is the agency responsible for operating the ALPR systems, and according to my county Police Chief his department doesn't use ALPR technology, so I wonder how readily the various enforcemnt agencies have access to the the acquired database(s)?
Rats Communicate Mind-to-Mind With Aid of Brain Implant
Now if only they'd release a diamond-encrusted model...
This is caused by an unfortunate bit of code in the standard library, but is hardly representative of a fundamental problem in Go as the article implies (unless you view casting and interface coercion as a fundamental problem, and I know some people do, but that's basically a different debate since Go does not pretend to be a purely statically typed language by any stretch of the imagination).

I've been using Go regularly for nearly two years now and haven't run into an issue quite like this either with the http package (what he's doing that causes this to be a problem is legal and should work, but is not a common use case) nor with any other bit of the standard library.
Source: I run a few production backend services in Python. Mostly to Debian boxes.

No matter what your product anticipates, it doesn't anticipate all the things I do, in fairly boring applications. I compile my own Python. I install postfix for some applications. I install a kernel module that increases the Linux entropy pool. You have not anticipated my set of problems.

What this means is that no matter how much great stuff your product brings to the table, I bring just as much, if not more, configuring your product and designing a deployment solution around it for my application.

If your product isn't open-source, that's a non-starter for me. Because now I'm worried that I could spend a lot of time configuring the product, and not being able to add that one feature that I need. I'm not sure if you can run a business with an open-source deployment product, but I know that I won't ever use a closed-source one.

Do a better job of explaining how these apps run. I took a look at your sample manifest files, and it wasn't clear to me if you are installing nginx or something? Or if you intend the apps to be daemon-like? So create a page that explains, in words, how to deploy a daemon-like app and how to deploy a webapp, and who is responsible for installing the web server and editing its configuration file(s) (do you clobber them?) and what web server it is supposed to be.

Finally, add a docker.io example. It's not production ready, but it looks like it's designed for people like me who have deployments involving heterogeneous payloads. I'm going to move to it eventually, so if I was to switch deployment stacks I would want good support for it.
It depends on what your definition of "fundamental problem" is. If being able to treat a value differently than it was received, or to perform computations that you shouldn't be able to, e.g. impure actions inside a pure function, then very few languages satisfy that property. Even Haskell isn't safe because of unsafePerformIO--you'd need Safe Haskell, at the very least.

Go has never tried to be, and the authors have never tried to give people the impression that it is that kind of language. Some of the safety comes from the language e.g. doing array bounds checking, not letting you manipulate memory manually, etc., but the rest comes from discipline and idiomatic code. (Same thing as not using 'undefined', 'fromJust', 'unsafePerformIO', etc. in Haskell unless you're absolutely sure they won't do harm--they are too useful to remove, even if they are the sources of many headaches.)
I lived in NYC for just under 8 years, and I don't think I noticed being bitten by a mosquito even once. There just aren't that many mosquitos in NYC.

When I go back home to Minnesota, I notice being bitten when I'm out in the wilderness, even though I no longer have an immune reaction to the bites.

Though, I suppose it's possible that NYC has some species of mosquito that is less attracted to the head and doesn't buzz in the ears so much, and bites more subtly than the mosquitos in Minnesota or Texas.
You can run Scala on GAE as long as you have the Scala dependencies so that shouldn't be a problem.
>poor performance in a market which forces consumers to pay the actual price

The Russian market, not the market in general.
Part of the nuance of the issue is the difference between "give a man a fish" versus "teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime". There is a moral dilemma between spending money now to feed 100 people versus teaching one person to fish for a lifetime. That is a tough dilemma to solve. But different charities approach this in different ways.

The philosophy behind Kiva is to help people build sustainable businesses in poorer countries which have semi-functioning states (say poorer Latin American countries prone to dictatorships but still have some notion of property rights and trials for murders). This has the potential to bring entire communities to a more well-off state. Is it a good use of money? Undoubtedly. Are you better off giving that money to better charities that target people with more acute needs? Probably.

Here's another example: you might have seen criticism of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for spending lots of money on eradicating polio. The argument is that instead of spending upwards of $1000 a head on eradicating Polio (cost divided by number of annual polio deaths), they could spend that at $10 a head on reducing malaria deaths. The counter argument is that _eradication_ is a huge win because once you've eradicated polio you can stop all future payments on Polio containment (which is in the billions of dollars annually) because you've permanently solved the problem, for present and future poor people. It turns out that the net present value of all those future payments equaling zero (just as today we spend zero dollars on small pox containment and treatment and vaccination now that we've eradicated it) makes it worth it to actually spend a disproportionate amount of money on polio vaccines on the ground (as the Gates foundation is doing), even if the marginal dollar saves less lives today than if we put it into malaria vaccines.

If you're interested in this line of work, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is probably one of the best charities out there, since they actually grapple with these questions. But they're not actually capital starved (they're spending money as fast as they can). To answer that meta-question, you should look at GiveWell, which is probably the best meta-charity (they actually evaluate charities, and also factor in things like scalability, so they rank charities but also state how much money they think that charity needs before your marginal dollar should be allocated to the next one on the list since the first one will have enough money to accomplish their goals). They also look at how well run the charities are at actually accomplishing what they want to accomplish, etc.

In short, if you want to do the most good in a utilitarian sense, you can't do any better than going to GiveWell and donating to charities as per their recommendation. Honestly, if you needed to calculate a joint probability function over total human utility, and wanted to target your dollars at maximizing that function, Holden Karnofsky (the guy at the head of GiveWell) is exactly the person you should be asking.
A classic source of white noise is to reverse-bias a diode or the base-emitter junction of a transistor[1]. This produces shot noise[2] though, which is independent of temperature, so I guess it's not what they are using.

[1] http://darrenyates.com.au/electronics/archives/40
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise
Sorry, I only know what would work on me (and my friends). Didn't think I was that much of an outlier ...
This io.Copy behavior seems like an "optimization"... less explicit than I would like but sticks to the idea of an io.Copy.

Having a resource you own Closed on you isn't an optimization, it is a behavior change.
I agree. I think I edited my comment to specify that it's a much more unsafe assumption just before you posted your comment.
Saint Sheldon.
>Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.

>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.

I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).
Some of these comments are particularly worrying:

/* double speed, less random mode */
#define RNG_RBG2X 0x2
/* the initial numbers generated are "less random" so will be discarded */
#define RNG_WARMUP_COUNT 0x40000

A black box random number generator with some numbers being vaguely "less random"? That seems like an exceedingly poor idea.
I didn't use a sparse bundle, just a TrueCrypt container. It uses the full space allocated on disk, and I've rarely had an issue (1-2 times over 4 months) with Dropbox syncing.
Talk to that person next to you
Just got graduated and got a job in the software industry. Learned a lot from reading hacker news articles.

Thanks HN
I wouldn't say that any of that means that C itself is complex. It means your computer's native instruction-set architecture is complex (and full of undefined behavior), and C, being simple, just gives you relatively transparent access to it rather than trying to abstract it and standardize it and generally clean it up.
Intel processor can be remotely patched?! Then why did Intel spend $475m to fix the FDIV bug?
That is SO disturbing... They don't even check whether the parameter implements another interface, they do the check directly on the method by callin it... That's so ugly...

Reminds me of my surprise when i realized the math module only worked on float types, and that min/max only existed for some numerical types but not others. The thing in itself probably isn't a big deal, but it really questions the ability of the language to model complex relationships often found in business processes.
1. Yahoo Mail 2-factor authentication support is woefully incomplete: http://www.zdnet.com/a-half-assed-additional-factor-does-not...

2. Yahoo Mail does not enforce SSL unless you choose obscure menu options: http://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?page=content&y=PROD_MAIL_ML&l...
You are missing the context, which is that of an unambiguous parsing of any valid C code. Examples given are teasers for the parser, not a prorammer.
I like your point. And I do agree that a 100000-second day would be awesome, but I tried to switch to new time measurements _without_ having to redefine anything. A second is still a second. A day is still a day. I've only added a definition, the myriasecond (myria- being the 10000 prefix) and removed two definitions, the minute and the hour.
It doesn't seem to recognize negative numbers. So if you're like the 1 in 4 Americans who have zero or negative net worth, the "wealth" part of the app won't work.

* http://www.epi.org/press/news_from_epi_th_great_recession_ex...
The Golang team (or at least, Russ Cox) agrees with you:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-dev/o9i_SbGRrzI/SSuqW...
If you read Thomas R. Johnson , American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989. (heavily censored "official" history of NSA) you find out that Carter raised the question of privacy in discussions with spy chiefs.
Xamarin Raises $16M Series B Round