skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh come on. To say it is the "obvious" choice is heavy editorializing. I agree it's not going anywhere. As others have pointed out there is a fine language called C++. In point of fact Java is not the obvious choice, that's bit much. There are some very good arguments of Java that may or may not be deal breakers but are still issues ... There must be a middle ground from the power of C that is not OOP gone awry. :)
One time in school, we got that question and the choices were picture:

a) Fireman with hat
b) Baseball player with hat
c) Cowboy with hat
d) Bus driver without hat

We were told the answer was d), but my answer was, "The cowboy, because that's the only one that's not a real job anymore."
There's a lot wrong with Java, but even while having moved on and learned / used professionally many other languages I keep coming back to it and its ecosystem. There is still not another language / platform that provides the same level of a variety of things that are important to me:

* platform independence
* performance
* low level features
* simplicity and clarity (for reading, writing not so much)
* infrastructure/tools (IDE, visualvm, etc)

Admittedly, I lean more and more into JVM languages like Groovy and Scala these days. But even then I still drop into Java to write parts of the code that I want to be as fast as possible.
Just be honest and fair with your users, and they'll support you.
Samsung Galaxy Round: Get bent, get buzz -- but get real
Immix: Reference Counting that is competitive with tuned generational tracing GC
Video: Gradle for Android with the founder of Gradleware
Let's try and not put everything through and American lens. Let's keep the story focused on the people of Azerbaijan.
I can't speak for them, but I'm one of the beta testers and am under the impression you'll be able to send in the board for battery replacement when it finally dies. It's just not user serviceable at all.
Java may not be dying, but it does take off early on Fridays for golf.

Java is not dying the same way Cobol was not dying 10 years ago. It has a lot of legs left but nobody is 'hoping' to use it, they are told to do so.

Java is and always has been almost completely a corporate tool. Again, like Cobol, so the 'cool kids' are not going to give it much love. It's too slow to execute to compete with C++, its too slow to write to compete with Groovy or Scala. And all the cool kids pick an extreme and vote that way.

Java is not 'dead', but thought leaders aren't using it right now. The people who inherited the decision of thought leaders of 15 years ago are using it, so the writing is on the wall, its just going to take a while to be read.
I'm the owner of fundfill, and yes, there is an issue with the site. We're working feverishly to get the issue resolved. It is preventing money from actually appearing in the fund. I'd ask anyone interested to register with the site, and I'll email everyone once this is working. We're in a pre-startup phase, so I can only beg your patience with this bug. Would a Bitcoin account satisfy any lingering doubts? If so, I'll set it up as soon as possible. Again, my apologies for the problems with the site - this is the most traffic we've had. You can contact me at jbalfantz [insert symbol here] fundfill. Or twitter @joebalfantz / @fundfill
I detest evolution. Beings suffering, trapped in limited bodies and minds, forced to kill for survival and plagued with diseases. It's horrible that a person's quality of life relies on the results of a silly genetic lottery. It's a cosmic joke, I tell you.

What have these creatures done wrong to deserve such ridicule?

http://wtfevolution.tumblr.com
Sure. Remove your license plates and you will not get caught by a red-light camera. Instead you'll be caught by anyone casually using their eyes.
It's also a one of a kind and may never actually be used, but instead displayed in someone's private collection. Who cares if it's not particularly usable, it was not designed to be used from what I can tell.
Java is dying because it requires more and more resources to make it work. People look at the growing resource requirements and think "wow, look at how Java is growing! We even are teaching middle schoolers Java now!"

Wasn't the point of Java to release developers from having to worry about memory? Well, now we have to worry about everything else. It's a failed abstraction and now we have to live with it.
Yes, we mean "non-user-replaceable". It is easily swappable at our facility.
I'm imagining:

BMS PCB has high current input rings and a blade connector for balancing (like removable laptop batteries).

Bottom of case has screw lugs going up through high current input rings in PCB. Battery has ring terminals that are crimped & soldered to high current wires. The battery is in a protective casing that holds mating balance connector and injection molded features keep the high current ring lugs in place.

Battery drops into board, high current rings go over lugs and balance connector engages.

Rigid plastic goes over the top of all this (bottom when in riding position) with silicone seal around the perimeter. High current lugs go through the cover. Special ratcheting thumb screws tighten down the cover using the battery lugs as a mechanical connection while also pressing the ring connectors into the BMS PCB. Conductive grease on the PCB helps keep out water.

Battery would be 100% rigid, no dangling wires. Installation is two lugs, drops in, can be done by hand. Battery should come with a protective pouch or have integrated flip-over cover so it can be dropped in a messenger bag etc.

Solves I think all the issues, including avoiding costly or underperforming connectors, environmental sealing, ease of use, and the expensive BMS does not need to be attached.

I emailed them something to this effect, since they asked for input, though it sounds like they've purchased battery packs already.

Plus they may have considered this, it sounds good but I know production high current battery stuff is really tricky, I've looked at the area quite a bit.
It really doesn't matter how standard DRM is. Who cares really if we want to get rid of it? The harder it is (making DRM for publishers and distributors), the better it is for users, since it will give more incentives to stop using it sooner. Making DRM harder to spread should be the goal, not making it easier in any way.
It sounds like their decision was justified, but it's too bad they settled on a non-removable battery pack. It would be nice to carry a spare battery with you if you were planning a longer ride.
There's a handheld remote that's easily held and operated single handedly.
CFWheels has that already built into it, but I'm convinced that its a problem with the framework itself and not anything the author did.

the issue seems coming from this line:

https://github.com/cfwheels/cfwheels/blob/v1.1.8/wheels/even...

basically when wheels throws an error, it will try to send out an error email containing the environment and framework information. In this case there seems to be no smtp server defined, so CFML itself is spitting up its skull.

The error handling can be reworked so that the $mail() call is wrap in a try/catch so the 500 page will just be shown.

disclosure: part of wheels core.
This new post by Brian Balfour is related and super awesome http://brianbalfour.com/post/63581380690/customer-acquisitio...
Wireless remote they designed in house. Check out their promo video, just google for boosted boards.
No, now I'm not one to fall on either side here but there is certainly ... a lack of love for Java on HN. I mean its definitely there. If you hnsearch, you'll see. I agree, the JVM is a different issue.
I didn't think of it like that. I was thinking more from the perspective of having fans of your music actually contribute parts (i.e. lyrics, a verse, a bridge etc.). The session musician idea is an interesting use case and one that I like.
Just like Macbooks. Definitely not a deal breaker.
It's no different than the current situation.
Bug Report, The US Government appears to be down.
Emperor Augustus assured Gaius Malefictus that he would be
elected to the senate: "Don't worry about the elections. I've
made the appropriate arrangements. This day next week, you
will be a senator."

I can't imagine something like that ever happening in the history of politics. Or the results of a boxing match leaked early to the mafia boss before the fight has taken place, or...
Discovery 'could hold key to Alzheimer's treatment'
Show HN: I build interactive mindfulness tech.
d0ne, we are experiencing issues, and I'm trying to get them resolved as son as possible. Please note my message above. If you've registered with the site, we have your email, and I'll reach out to everyone once the issues are corrected. I'll post an update as soon as it makes sense to do so - for now you can see the fund and add money into your account, but the pledging to the TrueCrypt fund is broken. I'll update twitter as well - @joebalfantz, @fundfill
I have one section of one of the chapters live on my blog. It's about Finance, though, because I wanted to prove that I could make an enjoyable read out of the most dry subject. Imagine that the other subjects are much more fun ;)

http://blog.jle.vi/post/60827130799/im-considering-writing-a...

It's a great idea nonetheless to give people a sampler, I'll probably work on getting something ready to be previewed and push it out to all backers. Thanks for the feedback.
That is by not metrics what evolution simply is.
StartSSL.com. Free certs for non-commercial use. Something like $60 per year for as many commercial-use certs as you want.
> That's true, if you restrict yourself to what's usually considered "evidence" in science.

It's true that if you don't restrict yourself to the world of facts, you can do pretty much anything. And there are lots of contexts where I'm doing things decidedly not rooted in facts, such as enjoying and producing works of fiction for entertainment. However, if we're going to talk about the nature of the world, adhering to facts becomes mandatory. Otherwise, there is not a lot of meaningful exchange to have at all. Of course it's fun to kick hypotheses around - but a supernatural world view is usually not a mere hypothesis, it's a postulate made in conscious and willful contradiction to evidence.

For instance, I like Lord of the Rings, but the moment I insist people should take seriously my belief that orcs are under my bed, I have crossed the river into the land of delusion. Of course I'm free to entertain that belief, but people publicly calling it out as bullshit is not Chauvinism, it's an honest and rational response.
No, they cannot coexist.

Your claim is that the standard allows for only the DRM implementation to be proprietary. But a DRM implementation on an otherwise Free system is totally ineffective -- just grab the output. This is why things like HDCP exist. DRM implementations require nonfree components at all lower levels, i.e., a need to implement things besides the DRM portion outside of standards-compliant browsers.
Java is doing just fine and with the addition of closures in Java 8 I expect the already incredibly rich set of libraries to improve dramatically.
Also, GoDaddy will never, ever get another dime from me or any of my customers/clients.
Open source browsers where the only guiding light that led the web out of the darkness of an IE6 monopoly. And the WhatWGs HTML5 standard and the willingness of Open source browsers was the only thing that saved the W3C of complete obsolesence.

Yet the W3C releases a standard that condemns Open source browsers to second class citizens.

An Open Source browser such as Firefox, Chromium, Webkit etc. cannot support HTML-DRM, because the CDM (content decryption module) cannot be produced open source, and the proprietary blob that would implement it, cannot give any random program access to decrypt the encrypted content and dump it to disk.

This ensures that only proprietary browsers will be able to support HTML-DRM. In that future that the W3C envisions, Open Source browsers will never be able to gain any traction, and a heterogenous browser landscape will not exist. Alternative browsers will just become known as "those browsers that don't work" when they fail to serve up movies, images, audio, fonts, and various other resources because they have been frozen out from doing so.
It seems a little strange to me to promote a launch even at a minor scale with no screenshots or video at all showing exactly what the product is.

The blog consists of one entry. On the front page, the first "feature" is putting your team "in perspective" as they are "checking in and out" - of where? For what purpose?

Share, discuss, plan - in what format? Chat, stacked posts, threaded view a la yammer or the like? This is very vague!
What data have you found in terms of long-term performance/degradation on your battery packs?
It solves the problem of using mediocre developers to get code into production. Clunky, slow and overly complicated is infinitely better than a segfault.
I like the extra parens in the if condition. It's genius.

On the face of it, it appears that the parens are to ensure correct operator precedence because a bitwise OR is used (a common idiom because bitwise operators have the wrong precedence versus comparison in C).

But that's not what the parens are really for! They are there because gcc complains about assignments inside of conditionals unless you put parens around it.
The batteries sound impressive. But I think statement

"...the battery needs to deliver thousands of watts of electrical power"

should read "hundreds of watts" -- the watt has a unit of J(oules)/s. Thousands of watts then refers to thousands of Joules per second. They later clarify actual power output as being a sustained 230W (or 384W for a 10sec burst).
Automatic memory management...?

"Just use Boost" is not a viable strategy when it adds so much complexity in and of itself.

I'm not defending Java, but it's helpful to know what the limits of each tool are.
I disagree with you and think the statement that you quoted is entirely accurate. People can like the languages and tools built on top of the JVM and implemented in Java, without liking coding in Java the language itself.
Good idea to put "guarantee" in scare quotes. If Airbnb had an actual guarantee that landlords or tenants could depend on their terms and conditions would not be as scary as the are: https://www.airbnb.com/terms

Note especially this heartwarming section: "You acknowledge and agree that you and Airbnb are each waiving the right to a trial by jury or to participate as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class action or representative proceeding. Further, unless both you and Airbnb otherwise agree in writing, the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims, and may not otherwise preside over any form of any class or representative proceeding."

What could possibly go wrong?
Ask German: What is your hourly rate?
I've been living my life mostly using pacman with archlinux and in the last year I experienced the ubuntu/debian way for the first time... Trying to get around dozen of apt commands and other tools is truly painfull.

But it's probably just me that got used to a simple and easy life with pacman...
There was a time that I even had to create an ubuntu package, well, don't get me started, I cried a little and lost around 3 days.

Last time I installed arch was before they removed the menu driven installer and it sure had some problems and bugs, so even if I have not tried it yet, I think I prefer this way of installing. It's cleaner, simpler, so better.
Hyperloop optimization framework written in Python
Created by a group of aerospace engineers and computer scientists to provide a starting point for external contributions.
I'm fairly certain Java and C++ have comparable speeds, and I think in someways Java's faster.
Did I read that right? You think the games industry doesn't have that attitude?
Ask HN: Whats the hardest part of running your startup?
Tim is right in a way. Most users don't care of DRM, they don't even know what it is. They just want to be able to watch hollywood movies on the Web.

So on one hand W3C can ignore the user's need of wanting to watch movies, by not supporting DRM. Users would then continue downloading plugins. And developers would have no way of interoperating with these black boxes.

On the other hand W3C could do something about it. Users would then have no need to download plugins. And developers would have a much more interoperable system.

Sure we all agree that video should be like HTML, where you can view its source and copy it around and play around with it. But the reality is that movies are exponentially more valuable in today's market than any other digital medium, so it's obvious that their creators are less willing to give them out without any protection.

Yes you might be willing to open-source your jQuery plugin that you've built for your e-commerce startup. But are you willing to open-source your entire project?
Nate Silver did the same thing prior to the 2012 U.S. elections..
What do you get in exchange for the premium prices that Digicert and Verisign charge?
Sprint used to offer a plan called Data Worldwide which you could add on for $40/month on top of an Everything plan. It allowed roaming using one of their GSM/CDMA world phones in over 140 countries. You could even add it for just the time you needed it at a prorated charge. I used it extensively before they got rid of it (as of 2011, you had to be a corporate customer to get it). It was nice having unlimited data on carriers worldwide who didn't even offer unlimited data to their own customers!
Maybe there is no "why". The world is, no reason, at least nothing we could ever understand.
I would venture to say, with no facts or figures mind you, that if you were to evaluate the number of lines of code dedicated to kernel programming to that of applications running applications on the Internet, that the resultant figure would be so small for kernel code that it would look like kernel development doesn't even exist.

Saying that developers who use Java are poor quality is also an awful thing to say. Yes, there are many "poor" Java developers. But, it's only because there are so many Java developers in the first place. So, of course when you take even a small percentage of such a large number there will still be a large enough sample to look significant. It's the same for all other languages.

Java has been my primary language for the last 14 years. During that time I have worked with countless individuals who I would regard as some of the smartest and most competent programmers (who develop using Java) I have known or heard of. These people make your banks, file sharing sites, massive online market places, electronic billing etc. work. So, go ahead and bash all the developers from Google, Sun, SpringSource, Apache Contributors, Oracle and the other 10,000+ companies out there, but empirical evidence has shown that the language and platform work.

Your statement is just so "trollish"... seriously?

Edit: capitalized Internet. Letting the run-on sentences and bad grammar fly.
The concept of an afterlife is appealing to me as an atheist, but that doesn't make it true. And that's really the core problem of religious arguments: wishing very hard for the laws of the universe to change doesn't make it so. Ever the technocrat, I would take that innate wish for an afterlife as an unconscious manifestation of the desire for humans to transcend their biological existence and move on to something better. And that's certainly something worth pursuing. But just sitting on a rug and insisting it's already an option, provided you adhere to certain mystical rules of course, now that's just unproductive nonsense.
Sorry, as a country that got recently the Freedom of speech, politics and all that B.S.; I do consider the freedom of moving and travelling (without being harassed) to be orders of magnitudes more important.

Freedom to move and travel is a necessity.

Freedom to speech is good, but not really that necessary.
C++ is a tool for language experts. If you can effectively apply that expertise it is extremely expressive and efficient.

Java does have some unfortunate complexity, but I don't think it is in the same league.

Java also includes a library that is more extensive in some areas than the vanilla standard C++ one.

The JVM is also more robust to some types of programmer errors than any run time for C++ that I know of.
A bit of everything. My classes used Scheme, Java, C, ASM, Python, Lua[1], JavaScript, Prolog, OCaml, Coq... Whatever fits any given subject best. And of course you have a bunch of classes like algorithms and theory which do not use a real programming language at all.

[1]: Okay, not really Lua but a custom language heavily based on it.
All of our (the CS degree program I attended) 100s/200s courses in the late 90's were taught using C. From what I remember they didn't "claim" to use any particular language and basically if they did I wouldn't have known what they were referring to anyway.

Java came onto the scene with much fanfare. It was a big thing and all the professors were quick to foist it upon us.

On a side note, it’s funny for me whenever anyone says they chose the JVM for speed. It’s still ingrained into me that this is not the case. I have to take a second and assure myself this is not 1998, Java is fast now.
Meh. It’s a post-socialist corrupt shithole, not North Korea or Nazi Germany. Some people will lose their jobs, which they kind of deserve for being incompetent anyway. That’s all that will happen.
Yep, that's what I meant by press in my comment, I should have probably worded it as "marketing budget" or something more obvious as I can see how it could get confused with press as in pressing a copy of a record.

You are right about labels one day just being startup incubators and venture capitalists for bands. I guess when you factor in all of the benefits the Internet brings to a band, there aren't many left a label provides other than cash. For a true decent recording you need cash for studio time, a producer and then more money to get it mixed and mastered.
I faintly remember the WWDC session (I wasn't there. I only watched the videos) about background launching to talk about this exact issue. I also remember thinking that this is going to bite people.

I agree with zaroth here: don't downgrade the keychain security for the password. Either do nothing if the phone is not authorized or store a token in more accessible security levels.

That's what the presenter in the session has recommended too.
The DRM in HTML-DRM is called the CDM (content decryption module) and it would be supplied as a proprietary blob/OS API.

In order for the browser to work (with images, audio, video, fonts and so forth) it needs access to the raw frames (for layout and compositing into the page of the content).

The CDM cannot give any random program access to decrypt any given stream, as that would allow anybody to save the content to disk in plain, which is exactly what DRM is intended to prevent.

As a result, non proprietary software cannot make use of a "standardized" DRM infrastructure, since modifyable software cannot be trusted to use the API in a fashion that the authors of the DRM want them to use it.

This means that Open Source browsers (such as Firefox, Chromium, Webkit, Khtml etc.) are relegated to second-class citizens who cannot serve the web that the W3C envisions. At first this is an unfair handycap, but then this becomes a threat to the Open Web, as the proliferation of DRM across large web properties will make those properties unusuable to Open Source browsers.

Eventually you end up again with a browser monopoly (like IE6) that stiffled all progress on the web for more than 6 years.