skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My local museum had dioramas about the coming ice age. It was science of its time - we've spent a lot more time and money on climate science since then. We have much more powerful computers (What's a modern smartphone like compared to the total world computing power in 1975?).

It is unfortunate that denialists use it to argue against ACC but don't make the mistake of saying that "the ice age was never serious" - it was.
While it's an interesting idea (and I know the pain!) the problem is that you are out for a smoke for max 10 minutes. So there should be quite a lot of active users from the start, otherwise you check once, twice, no one is out there, forget it. Unless some people try to make some money of it using this app, by selling extremely overpriced cigarettes.
Sure you can. Answer a hard stackoverflow question in your favorite field, Voila, you learn something, or need to connect the dots.
As an aside, Go is also "a Java" in the same sense that Clojure is a lisp (similar syntax and concepts, same level of abstraction, same philosophy). In fact, Google seems to be turning out many of these "Javas" lately (Android, Go, Dart).

While Java and its variants' appeal at most large organizations is considered by some a sign of their conservatism, Google is anything but when it comes to picking the best tools. Google's fondness of Java is evidence of the merits of the Java philosophy when it comes to maintaining large codebases by large teams.

Creating a language that follows this philosophy while still boosting productivity (and maybe providing other benefits as well) is an interesting challenge. I think Go falls short. Kotlin looks interesting.
The UTF-8 hack is beautifull. All the problem of corruption range come from standardization commities. The only purpose of corruption range is to not admit that UCS2 and UTF16 were very bad ideas that should be killed.
> But why is there a "leader" to begin with? In swarms of birds the older birds do have some specific roles, but real "leaders" seem to me a brittle approach.

I agree, and it seems nature agrees. Anyone who think a leader is required should watch a flight of a thousand starlings maneuver adeptly without collisions, a swarm of bees or ants carry out their duties without any command hierarchy, or a modern government rob the people blind with nary a collision between the overwhelming number of redundant departments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY (starlings in flight)
Coq is an excellent tool for software-assisted theorem proving, but it can also be good to know how to do certain things without the help of a computer. This course is about a theory of programming that's practical and simple enough to use on its own, without support from a tool like Coq, just like one might calculate the answer to a multiplication problem on pencil & paper, without using a calculator.

For all its simplicity, the theory is still general: it deals with parallel, sequential, probabilistic, deterministic, standalone, and interactive programs, as well as time (incl. real-time) and space bounds. It can even be used as a rigorous way to solve probability problems by hand, by writing a program to simulate the scenario and proving what its result is. (http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hehner/ProPer.pdf)
> If you deal with things on screen or what humans perceive as character (graphemes) then there is nothing really that can help you at the encoding level because graphemes can be arbitrarily long with regard to code points:

> e̬̱ͤ̈́̿̂̅́͟x̰̞̻̼̻̼͉̰ͫͧ̑͂͊͜ͅa̶̳͖͔̞̰͈̯͓͆̓̎̉̏̎̚m̛̮̩͙ͦ͗͆̄̋́̄p͎̥̠͈̮͚̾ͅl̛̗̈̄e̴̞̫͖̝̘̋̑̄̎ͥͬ̾

As how many characters am I supposed to perceive this, anyway? Some of those tiny squiggles are in fact letters (I mean they look like letters, I see an e,m,u,o,i and r in there). What if you'd make a crossword this way?
No, there should be a more stringent review of the permissions apps request. The dangerous ones should be marked in red and you should approve each one individually.
Sort of. It's based on the NewOS kernel written by Travis Geiselbrecht ( http://newos.org ) who in turned based many of the concepts on his experience as a BeOS kernel engineer. The Haiku project chose the NewOS kernel because it was open and used reasonably similar concepts and goals as the BeOS kernel did, which they'd otherwise need to emulate.
Note that you should avoid using this (or anything else with JS) to emulate shortcuts.

The reason is because what this usually looks like "oh nice I can define shortcuts people can press". What it actually means is: "Ohcrap, that shortcut only works for US-US 104 keyboard layouts, and about 80% of people can't press that shortcut".

For example: suppose you want a shortcut for shift+/, which is for the US keyboard under the small right finger. But that shortcut can't be defined for SG (swiss-german) because there the / is on the numeric bar where 7 is. So if you assume (for whatever reason) that left+right small finger is a convenient shortcut, and left small finger + right index finger top isn't, then you're totally screwed. Instead, to reach the right small finger low on swiss german, you'd have to define shift + "-". Except that if you define that, it'll be one of the most uncomfortable keyboard shortcuts imaginable for US users, which find - on the numeric row top --> bottom left small finger + top right small finger = ugh.

The truth is that you cannot do reasonable shortcut definition the way that everybody would like to with JS... yet.

But wait, can't you like, define some reasonable presets and let people choose their own? The answer is no, because you don't have a reliable way to translate a keydown/keyup to a unicode char, and the unicode char is related to the modifier keys, not the key cap, so though you can do that shortcut definition, you can't show to the user what that shortcut definition actually is, because it'd be either undefined or completely wrong.

I've written at length about this here: http://codeflow.org/entries/2013/jan/30/keyboard-events-in-j...
> Do you have any examples of forks being made due to someone asking for donations?

IIRC XChat / YChat is one off the top of my head
The Killing of Tony Blair by George Galloway MP
> Do you have any examples of forks being made due to someone asking for donations?

CentOS and MariaDB come to mind as two possible examples, that started as a means not to pay for the original projects.

> Compare that to the FOSS situation where, given that the source code is open (and due to copyleft any forks will also remain open), you will never be locked-in to one provider and their whims even if you are totally dependant on that specific piece of software.

This is exactly the problem when trying to make a living out of it.

While it is very convenient for the users, it does not guarantee that you as the author will get paid to work on it.

Tomorrow another guy might come along, fork the project and start getting the money instead.

The Android market is a prime example of this, where lots of apps are just plain forks, with the original authors getting nothing in return.
Not really because a single CR or LF does not do a real CR or LF.
I always thought the Java love at Google came from needing speed more than a startup -- they automatically will get factors of ten more users directly for most everything they do. (Edit: Point is, "Java-like" is Google's optimum for other reasons than being conservative.)
It was only a matter of time. I think everyone saw this coming from a mile away.
How do you handle exceptions and errors who would require a rework of the job?

That is interesting, I was looking for something similar to an EBS for PHP time ago, but eventually I wrote myself an ad hoc solution which uses MySQL (and row locks) plus a gearman worker and cron.
I was involved in a company that hosted and rented servers for video games. It grew really big, but shut down solely on the basis of, "these 12 year olds are going to drive us insane."
Android 4.4 KitKat Running on Nexus 5 Log File Leaked Revealing Features
That's keyboard ghosting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_%28key%29#Key_jamming_...

http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/antighostingexplain...
There's an interesting part in the linked article, including a reference to HN:

He found that iMessage Chat for Android essentially inserted itself into the middle of the normal back-and-forth between a user and Apple's iMessage servers. In a thread on Hacker News [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6435902], Freeman spelled out his findings.

At least on iOS, the man-in-the-middle part would not seem unusual:

As far as I know, messaging apps that want to be available to the user all the time, need the user credentials in order to keep the users online since there is no way on iOS for an app to reliably run all the time. And such messaging apps use the user credentials on their own server(s) to keep the users online and reachable. If the app is no longer running and a new message arrives, the server sends a notification to iOS and the user can open the app if he wants to read the new message.

A major difference is of course that the iMessage user credentials are (cannot be?) used only for messaging.
Ghosts Hunter HTML5
Hello, this is my first HTML5 game, it works on desktop, android, ios, windows phone 7 and 8 and firefox OS
I hope you like it
"This stuff about having to walk in with a lot of detailed knowledge, learned on my dime and time, just as needed by Facebook for just an 'employee' position in a big company, that is, an organization that in a few years might just decide to layoff 20,000 employees, is getting to be a bad, old story. A startup, even for grass mowing, literally, looks more promising."

Spot on! Another way of looking at it is that tech companies don't want to spend $ training their employees (including a slightly longer ramp up time for an employee to begin contributing). If they did, the hiring process would be: you had a 4.0 in college. This shows you are good at learning new things. Lets check for personality fit and some other things that a college transcript does not capture. Do a one hour interview. Hire or No Hire based on this.

As a startup founder, you should be happy about this state of affairs. The attitude of large companies makes it easier for you to hire :)
Cool experiment, lots of discipline and lots of creativity. I poo-pooed the experiment in the past as the author described no programming experience prior, which I disputed. But irregardless, this is pretty awesome in my opinion, especially because the project was continued to completion, and that in itself is a 0.5% thing.

Inspiring effort.
Nice article to point students at: software has less 'valence' for them than, say, clothing (c.f. No Logo, Naomi Klien) and so we might get a discussion going.

I'm surprised that noone has mentioned the recent restarting of the gNewSense project, version 3.0 is Debian Squeeze with blobs removed. I'm posting this using the live ISO from a USB stick with a USB wifi adaptor (Thinkpads have wifi cards that need closed firmware). Everything else works. The release announcement was posted on HN but only gathered 3 points...
Its the guys who layout the overall design, making it is easily extensible and not prone technical debt who make a software project. They may not be the most productive in producing code, but they allow others to be so.

It's usually the same guy going over others peoples code, and reducing technical debt.
Sure, performance is a big requirement for them, but there are other languages with good performance and better expressivity (like Haskell and Scala), yet they are not used at Google, and Google's new languages did not adopt their philosophies.
Unix domain socket support for Clojure's nREPL
http://www.loadimpact.com
To be fair, many of the websites she made would literally take most of you 3 minutes to build, like this one:

http://jenniferdewalt.com/whats_my_ip/page

But there are definitely others that would take me a couple of hours, like this one:

http://jenniferdewalt.com/hangman/game
I think this article might well be the kick in the pants I needed to get into i0S/OS X programming. It and the new i0S 7 look.
You're showing your bias with the ranges you've chosen. Capping the poll at "$200k+" is effectively a statement that you don't believe in the existence of consultants who charge north of $100/hr and work close to 2000 hours per year.

A fair chunk of your initial datapoints are challenging that assumption.
I think the dot com will be the traditional bet, but over time become one of those 'nice-to-haves' - - with the ridiculous amount of squatting on the most bizarre terms, other tlds are becoming far more attractive.

Above this, the dot co people are making great strides in offering a wide range of benefits to signing on. Not only discounts and freebies, but the potential of a community. In the future, I think more tlds will adopt this model to attract business.
On a personal level I would not really appreciate something that encourages more smoking (Everywhere I go I have to deal with other people's smoking, it's noxious and I don't see a good argument to letting people smoke in places like public parks or walking along sidewalks, yet it happens all the time).

But on the more business-y level, this does seem interesting. Ideally, there's a big potential market for people bumming cigarettes , especially in crowded areas. But I see two major problems:

- In crowded areas, how do you identify who the seller/buyer is ? There's a contacting issue (maybe face pics could solve this).

- As mentioned by gedrap, you'd need a pretty big density for this. People aren't willing to cross town to get a cig like they would to pick up free cupboards.

Honestly, a better solution for this would probably be a sort of dispensary where you could just deposit cigs somewhere and people could buy them. Or just cut out the user-aspect, and make a single-cigarette dispensary. That would avoid quality problems. Unfortunately this solution isn't necessarily "interesting", but it's probably the most "correct".
>I would happily pay a small sum each month for someone (or someone's) to work on FOSS software I use a lot[...]

You're in luck. Gittip is exactly the model you are describing, and it's already active and supporting (in part) the works of hundreds of FOSS developers:

https://www.gittip.com/
Regarding this form of mockup: it was not clear what else I could do besides clicking between the years from the dashboard view. In general, I think many will not have figured out that you're supposed to click somewhere.

So it's subscriptions management app, cool. It won't be so trivial to deduce the subscriptions from the users mailbox, wonder how you'll do that.
What is his utopia? That all software would be free software?

I for one would love to live in such a world. Why? Because then I could trust and be free with my computing. Now I can't, and I value my trust and freedom over conveinience and entertainment, as such I haven't opted-in for many common usages of computers and computing. It would be nice, but no thanks.

Would the world be a better place if Firefox and GNU/Linux were proprietary? I doubt that. How could we trust Tor? How could we(as in the whole internet-connected world) have any form of secure communications which we could trust? In fact, I think we would see far more oppression and totalitariatism in such an alternative, I believe free software helps tremendously with this as it gives more freedom and makes it harder to take freedoms away and harder to enforce blind faith on authorities.
Maybe he really meant to reply to the Goldman Sachs comment :)
The headers are data, not text. Somewhere along the way you'll need to interpret them; doing a good job of that at the system boundary is the only sensible approach. (It's not the approach the majority of tools have taken, but it is the only sensible approach). If it gets into the system as text, people will start pulling it apart in even worse and less consistent ways.

I agree with you that the parse behaviour for HTTP headers is poorly defined. That's something I'll be wrestling with all the time.

Supported headers will be in one place and uncommon extension headers in another. Such, alas, is life. But really, the only time when I would expect this to cause any trouble at all is when new headers are added. Compare it with things like the CGI standard and how it handles headers and you'll realise it's not such a bad system.

I should make it quite clear that the specs are (unfortunately) only a starting point for rust-http. Where there are deviations, more leniency may be added. But it'll be added thoroughly and properly.
>>People love to say that a rockstar can do the work of 10 regular engineers. That's just nonsense. 9 women can't have one baby in a month, and 10 "rockstar" developers can't replace 100 regular ones.

A somewhat confusing attempt to use the 9 women analogy here - it doesn't prove the author's point in any way.

I've worked with rockstar coders and engineers and my empirical experience suggests he's wrong.
Are “free” web-services cheese in a mousetrap?
The last few months everyone seems to be freaked out about NSA spying on the world (and their own citizens in particular). It seems to even have become fashionable to complain about surveillance, demand stuff from congressmen, CEO’s, the government. It’s all very nice, but people seem to be missing the point:
Your privacy is being sold every single day to the lowest bidder for a price as low as 5$ per year, and the NSA isn’t the only buyer.
:) I guess what I meant to say was Java speed (or greater) Python.
I don't understand Mozilla's game plan. Do they want to be the company that makes a bunch of "me too" copies that are a little bit crappier than what Google makes or do they want to fix their browser. Seriously, focus. I want Mozilla to do well.
Jack shit.
I turned over ~$80k in my first year freelancing. This year will be substantially higher.

Battling against imposter syndrome and finding out how much your worth to a company/business is one of the hardest things about freelancing. I still today believe I'm undercharging for my skill set. Especially when I compare my ability/experience to those I'm working with who are earning a similar amount of money.

At the same time, money really isn't everything. I've worked many more days this year than I did the last, and that's come with certain sacrifices. No longer going for Monday afternoon walks with my sister and niece is something that I really miss now.

The trick is, as far as I'm concerned, not to compare what you're earning to others, and be happy with your own work/life/financial balance.
When your only tool is "Let's build an App for that"...
New iOS making users Sick
After reading numerous posts on the subject of 10x software engineers, I reckon they fall mostly into two categories:

- `I have worked with / seen code of such ones' (often examples follow)

- `there were no such ones on any team I ever managed', with OP falling into this category.

Which is to say, the existence (or absence) of 10x software engineers appears to be party recognition problem -- managers do not want to believe one `rockstar' is responsible for most of team's output.

The other part, is the sampling bias: managers don't get to work with the Torvalds, Bellards, etc. Such software engineers often don't need to be, or aren't managed while producing their most important code. Neither they do respond to ``we are hiring rockstars'' types of job ads...
You can't compare income from FL between 1st and 3rd world countries. I know for a fact that some of countries don't have other choice but to do FL business over various semi-shady sites like Freelancer, Elance, oDesk, Guru, etc, where it is incredibly hard to generate >$20k/year income.
There is an article in the Swiss press about that case but no mention of what he ended up paying in the end. They did take his car as collateral which is valued at ~300,000 USD.

http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/panorama/vermischtes/Tempo-290--...
> It’s quite embarrassing to ask for a cigarette. It makes you look like a moocher. You might get turned down. Worst of all, you get forced to confront your horrible addiction.

So offer money when doing it. If I want to bum a smoke I'll offer a quid (£1 for 1/20th of an £8 pack) - more often than not, they'll give me a fag without taking the money. Equally when others offer me money for a cigarette I won't take it (while if they don't offer, I'll give them one anyway if I'm in a good mood... but not always).

The app seems to solve a problem I don't think really exists - trying to find smokers - while it's list of reasons (such as using money to make it less embarrassing) can be solved by individuals already, very easily.

Here's the app I'd find useful - where can I buy cigarettes, full packs. I have this problem when I go abroad (Paris, you need to find a bar not a shop. Vienna you seem to be shit out of luck on a Sunday - but maybe I looked in the wrong places), and I have this problem when I'm out late (last night I had to spend a while in London trying to find somewhere that was open late, and even then they only had one brand so I had to get that.. while paying a premium).
Wouldn't it be better to avoid calling the V() default constructor every time the function is called? You never know, it might have some long-winded side effect...

template<typename V, typename R>
R defaulted(const V& val, const R& default_val) {
const static V v0;
return val == v0 ? default_val : val;
}
> make a single-cigarette dispensary

.. or sell them in the same places packs get sold, whether that's shops or bars or machines or wherever.
That's very different. Salary is one's daily bread, options are a gamble with a very tiny chance at making one rich.
Is this the first test of their return procedure when they are going to re-light the first stage after separation and fly it over the ocean and "land" it in the water?
Not that I use it, but I like "'ls -thor', for when you need the power of a Norse god!"
Plus he will be able to use F# easily since it is derived from OCaml.
Speaking about 'repositories of sentences', you can try Tatoeba.org. It’s not without its faults, but it’s a fairly large downloadable (CC-BY) database of translated sentences.
That's not legal in the UK, where people buying single cigs tend to be children.
I worked on oDesk from Mumbai for a while making ~50k/year. It was surreal.
[video] Steve Ballmer's farewell to Microsoft
I think that there is still a fundamental problem of string encoding.

The problem is that decoders cannot know what encoding a byte stream was encoded in without additional information.
Such information are often lost or omitted as you can see in web world.

In such a situation, what decoders can do is just guessing. This is the reason why we still suffer Mojibake.

A possible solution was to attach encoding information to a head of bytes as one or two byte.

For example:

UTF-8 = 0b00000001

UTF-16 = 0b00000002

Shift_JIS = 0b00000003

EUC-JP = 0b00000004

and so on.

Of course this is not actual and reasonable solution because everyone must switch decoder/encoder to this protocol at once.
If I was a Mozilla engineer and I saw the chromecast, I'd think it was neat and hack out a quick version on a Saturday afternoon.

I think the ability to experiment is one of the great powers of open source software, which is why I'm surprised somebody hasn't already linked the github or Mozilla hg repo of the code to make this work.

When you have a community, focus is impossible because there's nobody in charge: The worst you can do is not accept the patches. Nobody has said this was done on company time. I think you don't understand how Mozilla works if you think this represents any sort of game plan: It's just an engineer writing something cool to make his favourite browser do something the other one does.
This is the first flight of the Falcon 9 v1.1 version.

They are going to test the propulsive return profile by doing a retro burn and then slowing down with another burn before hitting the water.