skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once again, whilst the shrill cries of protest claim that the government has gone too far in it's intrusive surveillance, the pragmatic amongst us are forced to admit that this is a capability that the state simply will not give up, even in the face of massive public protest and discontent.

Moreover, the technological trend is clear; and the avenues for sharing intimate personal information proliferate and multiply with every passing month. The debate therefore needs to shift. The question cannot be over whether the state should have access to this information. We are powerless to push on that point.

The question has to be this: Given that our state (and others) will necessarily know the most intimate details of our lives, how do we want it to behave? How do we want this information to be used? What do we want the newly intimate relationship between individual and state to look and feel like? It may well be that we come to a startling different conclusion than our initial starting points might presuppose.

There are tremendous social benefits to be had by using this treasure-trove of information wisely, just as there are tremendous dangers to be risked by using this trove with carelessness or malicious intent. However, we need to think very carefully about how we manage the relationship between individual and state; how we manage the relationship between individual and peer; and how we manage the relationship between individual and technology.

I feel strongly that this is the most important debate of our generation; perhaps the most important debate to be had in this new millennium.
Love how a good few of the adverts are just for more pixel ad pages
Gifalicious - Delicious for animated gifs
That was my first "business idea". After seeing it take off so rapidly. I setup first clone in my country and donated all profits to charity. It was not much, about $2000 in total but I learned a ton of useful stuff which helped me later to progress to bigger and more profitable things. What I learned back then is that if something works in one country, you can usually replicate it with some success elsewhere. I have taken that lesson and most of my successes in recent years been due to this "copy" strategy.
This article does two things that are very dangerous, and never mentions the reasons why they're dangerous.

* Messing with Function's prototype is very strongly frowned upon. It's tantamount to setting global variables. At the very least, give that definition an if (!Function.new) guard to prevent redefining another implementation that another script (or the browser!) has already given.

* Adding methods in the constructor is awful even if you're not using inheritance, because it burns memory like crazy. If you define sayHi on Person.prototype, then every Person gets a reference to the same sayHi method. If you define this.sayHi in the constructor, then each Person you create gets its own copy of the function, making every Person heavier in memory. Not a big deal for a simple console.log, but if you have more complicated objects with a few dozen methods that you're using a bunch of you can really make things chug.
I really recommand the first edition, even some things may seem simple it's good to see them written. I go buy the second edition.
Reminds me of Mindstorms:

http://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerful...

In the intro of the book Seymour A. Papert describes how gears provided an early concrete framework that made understanding abstract mathematical concepts presented at a later point much easier to visualize and apply.
I guess not entirely good way to advertise since quite a lot of them are either non existent or the domain shows something completely different :D
My advice would be to release it anyway, warts and all.

You'll never be truly happy with the internals and, if you're like me, you'll be forever "1 final refactor, 1 extra tweak" away from perfection.
Am I missing something?

"The word was coined by mutating the word ‘bite’ so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also nybble."
Squatters Right, Says Student Toilet Designer
>>Cat.prototype = new Mammal()

This is only useful if Mamaml has only methods and no properties which does not happen that often.

>> Cat.prototype.constructor = Cat

I never saw a practical usage of this one :-)

I think these days the standard way of doing inheritance should be -> MyClass.prototype = Object.create(baseClass.prototype)
C# Why can't a continue statement be inside a finally block? - Stack Overflow
Finally, advice from an investor that will make founders feel better
"Morgan Stanley used it for most everything"

this is entirely incorrect. They've been running with a plethora of different languages for a while now: Scala in particular, but theres a lot of work in C for HFT stuff.
Town of Slough, GB uses spy plane to catch immigrants living illegally in sheds
Forgot all about this. I toyed with the idea of buying some ad space when there was still some space available. In fact I remember when it was 80% free still.

I think I'm right in saying he went on to try another iteration of the pixel idea; http://www.pixelotto.com

By his twitter, it seems he's now running an iPhone meditation app at http://calm.com
An explanation for those who've never seen this before:

A long long time ago on an Internet far from here a young man had an idea. His idea was simple but genius. He would make a homepage (as they were called back then) with a grid of 100 by 100 squares each ten pixels across. Each square could hold an image 10x10 pixels. One million pixels.

Back when we didn't have retina displays and Stallmann was still young designers thought 10x10 pixels was plenty to make a pretty picture. You could then buy a square for one hundred dollars; a dollar a pixel. And if people clicked on the pretty picture you had made in your square they would be taken to your homepage. If you had lots of money or worked for one of those new dot-com's you could buy more than one square so your designer could make a bigger picture.

Now, you can probably guess why it was called the million Dollar Homepage (Hint 1000 x 1000 = 1 million), and as you can see all the squares were sold so the architect reached his goal, won his bet and retreated back to the matrix to devise new ingenious devious ideas.

Edit: changed ten dollars to one hundred dollars - thanks for pointing it out jgrubb.
The IPA transcription is somewhat suspicious, especially as "The word was coined by mutating the word ‘bite’ so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit." (ibid) I'm pretty sure that mutating [bait] to [bi:t] is somewhat complicated; also, e.g. Wiktionary lists the pronunciation as [bait]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/byte

Moreover, "correct" is rather subjective (and malleable in time), especially where English is concerned: "gay" once meant "merry," and "meme" didn't always mean "cat pictures subtitled with Impact"; does that mean the current usage is incorrect? That's not to mention the pronunciation of "tomato," etc. (cue linguistic flamewar)
In France, all is on the Web, but you’re not allowed to crawl it unless you pay :/
I remember he did this to pay off his tuition fees.
Top of the page says "byte: /bi:t/, n.", though there's no explanation for why it says so.

Wikipedia says "ˈbaɪt"
Seeing as we're talking of just 8 years ago, I don't think Stallmann was still young.
Decac - a higher-level assembly language
A miniature dot com boom: this company sells so much ad space -> let's be like them -> need marketing -> let's put an ad on their page!
Why Cyclone (programming language)
$ pacman -S applescript
error: target not found: applescript
$ pacman -S photoshop
error: target not found: photoshop
$ ruby --version
ruby 2.0.0p247 (2013-06-27 revision 41674) [x86_64-linux]

Hm, which of those can I use?
Nimrod is a statically typed, imperative programming language
I'm not really interested in debating the reaction of an imagined Haskell programmer. I was just restating what the grandparent's analogy meant.

Your question is fine, but not what he meant by the analogy.
> Law's complexity is not by design. Much of case law and legislation is about refactoring existing principles into something simpler.

Although it seems like there is also the accretion of "legalistic debt" (c.f. technical debt) when changes are made in response to (the perception of) urgent, high-profile problems.

It seems that, much like software, it's a lot easier to
add clauses to, or make minor changes to existing laws than it is to write a new, much simpler version that would cover all the same ground, get it passed, and repeal the older version.

I'm also curious about what effect changes to a particular law have on precedent based on an interpretation of an older version.
Mozilla Starts Hunting Down Software Bugs to Increase the Security of Firefox OS
Why Chinese flock to a Brighton chippy [video]
Perl isn't dead, I use it every day for important stuff. But it is true, people younger than say 32 are not very likely to know Perl well, most of them prefer python
HASP - High-Assurance Systems Programming
Thanks, btw there was a thread on this topic recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6096743
Free Pascal - OSS Pascal / Object Pascal compiler
Nostalgic!

Btw how did it go viral back then? Curious.
Was it cause of his story? Pay for tuition.
CityMaps Launches Official iOS App That Aims To Make Mapping Social
Early Stage Distractions
Remember this is Internet time (not to be confused with Swatch Internet time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time)) which is a whole different beast to normal time. I clearly remember both my dot-com coach and my advisory board telling me over champagne brunch that Internet time was at least 5 times normal time. This would make it 40 years ago, and not 8.
Myrddin - simple programming language
This has been here for 9 minutes and nobody has pointed out that a 10x10 square for $10 is not a dollar a pixel?!?
Demonstrating Go's Easy C Interop
June-language - A new face for Java code
But did you guys find Waldo? ;)
JRest Meta Programming Language
Szl - A Compiler and Runtime for the Sawzall Language
It's not Android bashing - he's managed to make the older, slower iPhone hardware perform better than the current high-performance kings (the S3 & S4) through smart software optimisation.

There's no reason he couldn't do the same on Android and see similar gains. It would just be a lot of work..
It was $100 for a 10x10 square; http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/buy.php
Awesome. If you type in your number as if you were local, do you get the iMessage?

(Internally I add the international prefix. As you can imagine it took a while to find all of the local prefixes and create number masks!)
Luvit - asynchronous I/O for Lua
Any way to look around without forcing a sign-up? Delicious has that option (Browse Delicious).
PyF-ck: A simple BrainFuck implementation using Python
This was 2005, so its not that long ago, we already had facebook for example ;) Still the idea was pretty novel and worked, many tried to copy the approach and failed. Even Alex Tew, the guy behind the site, came back later with a Photobook and some other pixel based business idea (pixelotto) but couldnt replicate the success.
SISAL Parallel Programming
Google tells some Glass Explorers to invite a friend
Zen - a cross-platform functional programming language
The most interesting thing about this is how many of the links don't go anywhere anymore.

After a few minutes searching I was only able to find one site that still worked.
The Camera Roll will apparently host them, but not show them as animated.

Unless you roll your own viewer, many devs suggest using an embedded UIWebView to animate it.

Otherwise it kinda gets treated as pass-through for most of iOS. The Messages app apparently animates them nicely, and for some is a real motivation to include the feature. (So they can send animated GIFs to their friends.)

Glad you like the app! :D
UFO - a general-purpose functional programming language
Microsoft Surface revenue less than write-down and advertising
Penor-programming-language
#15 is broken - sort of. It works, but breaks the page layout.
Apart from pixelotto he also started onemillionpeople.com which basically was a photobook where you could buy a place for your own picture.
I think pixelotto had some small success but overall his later "riding the wave" ideas didnt do to well.
After Bret Victor's inspiring talk yesterday, it's fitting to see a new CPU architecture make it to the top of HN.

Keep it up! Maybe tomorrow we'll see an idea to replace threads and locks.
There's a certain amount of legislation which is of the be-seen-to-be-doing-something variety. But that too gets reformed now and then. Lots of legislators are ex-lawyers, they hanker to tidy the place up inbetween shitting on everyone.

> It seems that, much like software, it's a lot easier to add clauses to, or make minor changes to existing laws than it is to write a new, much simpler version that would cover all the same ground, get it passed, and repeal the older version.

Like software, it's easy to underestimate the complexity of the existing system and to overestimate the advantages of a single, sharp cutover.

The current system is not perfect, but it largely works by groping towards better solutions over time. Legal systems where the official concept of law is "we designed it ab initio with Pure Reason (tm)" tend to be just as riddled with contradiction and complexity. They just lie to themselves about it.

> I'm also curious about what effect changes to a particular law have on precedent based on an interpretation of an older version.

Most of the time it is very easy to make the connection. Either it's new legislation, in which case the legislature will amend the clauses that a court has interpreted differently from what they considered to be the intent. Or it's case law, for which every precedent is named and referenced. You can trace every legal principle back to its first expression.
Here is another writeup:

http://www.sexeys.somerset.sch.uk/alumni/alex-tew

…and our old school is really called Sexey's.
I seem to remember a lot of mailing lists discussing it, which is how I believe things went viral certainly in the 90s.
I actually advertised on this when it came out. $100 for the little zebra print square, top left corner, 2nd row down, "YOUR OWN PHOTO WEBSITE" (just to the right of 'Bingo').

Was fun to be a part of it going viral at the time.

EDIT: Incidentally, the amount of spam I've received since for clone sites has been staggering.
Judicata think so.
Part of Bret's theory of learning (which I agree with) is that when "illustrating" or "explaining" an idea it is to important use multiple simultaneous representations, not solely symbolic and not solely visual. This increases the "surface area" of comprehension so that a learner is much more likely to find something in this constellation of representations that relate to their prior understanding. In fact, that comprehension might only come out of seeing the constellation. No representation alone would have sufficed.

Further, you then want to build a feedback loop by allowing direct manipulation of any of the varied representations and have the other representations change accordingly. This not only lets you see the same idea from multiple perspectives -- visual, symbolic, etc. -- but lets the learner see the ideas in motion.

This is where the "real time" stuff comes in and also why he gets annoyed when people see the it as the point of his work. It's not; it's just a technology to accelerate the learning process. It's a very compelling technology, but it's not the foundation of his work. This is like reducing Galileo to a really good telescope engineer -- not that Bret Victor is Galileo.

I think he emphasizes the visual only because it's so underdeveloped relative to symbolic. He thinks we need better metaphors, not just better symbols or syntax. He's not an advocate of working "purely visually." It's the relationship between the representations that matters. You want to create a world where you can freely use the right metaphor for the job, so to speak.

That's his mission. It's the mission of every constructivist interested in using computers for education. Bret is really good at pushing the state of the art which is why folks like me get really excited about him! :D

You might not think Bret's talks are about education or learning, but virtually every one is. A huge theme of his work is this question: "If people learn via a continual feedback loop with their environment -- in programming we sometimes call this 'debugging' -- then what are our programming environments teaching us? Are they good teachers? Are they (unknowingly) teaching us bad lessons? Can we make them better teachers?"
How one genetic mutation first let Europeans drink milk-and changed the world
I was the developer who wrote the PHP that this site ran on. I knew Alex from Humanbeatbox.com - we were both beatboxers (known as A-Plus and BeatMuppet) who met at some jams. One night he rang me up saying that he had this site and it was getting a bit out of hand!

Initially he was managing the orders himself and manually updating the site, but as the media coverage grew and the traffic picked up, it was no longer manageable. I wrote a simple system to add, remove and move the pixels and helped with the orders.

Eventually, he had to take a couple of other people on to help with the orders - it really was a media storm as Alex was on TV and stuff!

It was a crazy few weeks but I'm very glad to have been a part of this!
I quite liked http://yournameontoast.com/

Perhaps because of the manual typography involved and the general silliness.
Can computers teach us what it means to be human?
You're right!

I thought "From Around the Web" was what we were talking about, but of course there are multiple similar blocks of paid links.
Not yet.

After login you see your collection of animated gifs and can add new ones via URL. Also there is a "detail view" of the gifs. Simple.
New technology to revolutionise the way we take care of the elderly
The crazy ideas which failed to solve the longitude problem [video]
> Some people even claim they find parentheses soup (LISP-like syntax) readable. Personally, I cannot comprehend that.

Lisp is read like python, you read indentation, ignore the parenthesis.
WHY DONT YOU CURE CANCER INSTEAD
Snowden granted 1-year asylum in Russia, leaves airport
Here is the link to the Kickstarter, since TechCrunch seems to be having issues with that:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/noflo/noflo-development-...

I'll be happy to answer any questions on NoFlo or the campaign here after I sleep a bit :-)
The article could have addressed overriding methods and calling the super method. Because that isn't simple.
This is actually a really good learning tool for showing people what different html/css properties do by visually showing the ranges and effects they give.
I think it is a bad sign that you say "I cannot talk about full features", when you are building a site which is dependant on people posting their ideas.

Irony?
Awesome project; deserved a post!
Why do people who love reading love it so much?
Some programmers are good at remembering large numbers of arbitrary rules. Others aren't, and I've worked with good and bad programmers of both kinds.

So yes, I'm worried that a colleague might read the code and not know what the precedence is, and they will have to waste their time looking it up (thankfully some IDEs now have an command to add parentheses quickly, but it's still a distraction from their actual task).

Pretty much all languages have some features that are more confusing than helpful, and good codebases avoid using those features (whether via formal policy or not). IMO most precedence rules fall into that category; it would be better if e.g. "a && b || c" were a syntax error until bracketed properly.
What is the most important thing you have ever learned from a movie?
it is too old post
Those of us living in THE FUTURE have to wait for the good things.
Why cooperators always win in the long run
> only people can detect and solve software bugs, not tools

Stupid compilers, they've been doing it wrong this whole time.
Not for me in Chrome.
Because it seems to be so natural.
>It's interesting that someone who professes loving to program in Perl refers to it as "PERL". People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language. It's like someone claiming to be a senior JAVA programmer, it's not an acronym.

Or some people just don't fucking care about "standard spellings" and prefer their own.
Actually, cancer research can benefit (admittedly by a long shot, but still) by these kind of improvements in image processing. Don't forget that medical imaging and - thereby indirectly - the recognition/detection of cancer is one of the first steps in curing said disease.
The war is perpetual, citizen. Remember:

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

Orwell in 1984:
"Part
of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep
its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made
it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the
process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance
which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same
instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen
important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty four hours a
day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda.")

It's a surprisingly interesting novel.
Market testing “Here´s to the crazy ones"
> If you test-and-return after every call, your function has multiple exit points and is far less maintainable.

There is nothing wrong with multiple exit points as long as:

a. the language has a mechanism for scoped resource allocation (ie. defer, finally, with, unwind-protect or "RAII")

b. the early exit doesn't happen in the middle of a long and complex function
I wrote a similar (2 series) article a while back that attempts to explain the same thing, but with a few diagrams. I know sketching out what was going on really helped me ...

http://www.looselytyped.com/blog/2012/08/18/on-prototypal-in...

http://www.looselytyped.com/blog/2012/08/22/on-prototypal-in...
Almost all of the links in the advertisements seem dead, sadly.
I'll add that the reason for using `struct{}` over `bool`, is that an empty struct occupies 0 bytes, whereas a boolean occupies 1.
What's wrong with that? It allows you to write type-safe sort-of-generic data structures. It's certainly better than 'generic' data structures that work on void*'s.
You can, but it makes more sense to assign it to a void \*. After all, it's a pointer but you don't know the size of the pointed object.

Note: this is not true everywhere since (data) pointers and function pointers can be represented differently, but on a PC it works :)
>you perceive correcting somebody as attacking them.

Correcting someone on a pedantic issue outside their main point IS considered if not an attack, then surely quite rude, in regular conversation.

Even more so when you add: "People who refer to it in all-caps instantly give themselves away as outsiders to the language" trying to expose them as some kind of wannabe poser.

What the fuck does this guy knows about the parent's history and expertise in Perl?
Prediksi Bola VfL Osnabruck vs FC Erzgebirge Aue
U.S. Laws vs. The Human Genome
Well it already exists, it's called Labview and it is awesome for building tools.
The demo works in Firefox, not just Chrome. What is this, some kind of standard that works across many different implementations? ;)

Too often do demos for showing off the web work well only in Chrome. This one works fine in Fireox, the animations are very smooth. I'm on a very basic Arch Linux setup I installed a couple of days ago, with no configs in any way other than installing the correct driver for my on-chip Intel GPU. So if it works for me, it should work for most people.