skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It should not take four months and pulling a lot of strings to get a visa, in particular if you have been to the US for many times, have invitations from renowned institutions etc.

I am not a scientist and I can usually enter the US on the visa waiver program but I always wonder if the latest visit was also the last, you never know. And while you get used to the usual 1- or 2-hour wait at immigration, you never know if you get selected for a secondary check or worse. As much as I like the US and being in the US, entering the US is always very unpleasant.
Actually, I mean IPO. Not in the case of success, but general success wasn't the question. Beyond that, I agree with you here, both linked in and german mittelstand companies are successfull in their own right. Yet, they are very different.

Green Tech is en vogue right now in germany, yes. But after what happened to the solar industry and is currently happening to the wind power industry leaves me a little bit sceptical. But I have an opinion all of my own on all of the green tech stuff which I'm pretty sure is very different to yours.

Having studied in Germany, I disagree with you regarding education. My experience was that trying out new things, experiment and question the status-quo is not actually encouraged.
Sometimes quite the opposite. In Germany, a lot of effort is spent on improving exiting technology, which is, again, one of the key strength. But as strengths go it can be really weakness in a different context. And when it comes to disrupt things (which start-ups should do) this attitude becomes quite a handicap.
Essentially, Quasar provides async and await for all JVM languages. async is called `Fiber.start()`, and await is called `Fiber.park`.

Other than working for all JVM languages, Quasar fibers are more general in that they can spawn many functions (they have a stack), while async is limited to a single expression block. Because of this, we can hide the "await" deep inside the JDBC call stack.

Under the hood, they are similar: both instrument your code. Only async does this at the language level (it's a Scala macro), while fibers do it at the bytecode level.
It could also be something in grey area.

Yeah, the world definitely needs more screwing over other people for money.
I saw a video of the founder giving a talk, seems like they are hijacking css3 animations and doing matrix calcs better optimised than most css3 browser implementations

Cool stuff but I wouldn't call it re-inventing the web
I use both, as varnish does caching well. Two haproxy servers where one is a fail over. varnish on both.
VS 2008 here, somebody apparently tested 2012 but nothing came out of it with people fearing that a different C++ compiler will break everything...
Every sensational title that pops up is sure to disappoint you.

These guys optimized some JS and you called it "reinvent the WWW". Ridiculous.
The point is that the American government have no right to monitor my communications with a website outside the US, given I live in the UK (we'll ignore that I work for an American company for a bit).

If the UK government decides they need to monitor my communications, fair enough. I am, afterall, subject to UK law.
It’s difficult as an events organiser to do the right thing
I just upgraded a VS2008 project to VS2010 and got a huge boost in compile times, worth it for that alone.
Keep in mind that there are a couple ways of achieving inequality:

* Rich people at the top and extremely poor people at the bottom. I generally think this is a bad thing.

* People who are ok at the bottom, and really, really rich people at the top. I'm less convinced this is a problem.

In any event though, this is swerving into kind of philosophical terrain about what we all view as the best society.

I too got out of Silicon Valley because I didn't like it, but that's fine, the world is a big place and there is room for different ways of doing things without hating on some large, successful companies because they don't have a political view that you happen to like.
Does anyone really believe there aren't similar entities in other countries doing the same?

This argument is often used, and it's a bad one because it ignores that there are different levels of surveillance. No one is saying that other countries don't respond to illegal stuff going on on the Internet. But not every country in the world has opted for the all-out, monitor-every-law-abiding-citizen thing that NSA is doing.

Save for the UK, I can't think of a single Western European country that goes to the extreme lengths of surveillance that the US does.
Mir isn't yet ready for prime time. I wonder if they're planning an LTS launch for it. Won't be too good if that happens.
Stephen Elop Was Second Choice as Nokia CEO, Ex-Chairman Says
Good job on the site.

I'm not sure if this information is motivational or debilitating. :)
I think the improvements we'd get in Entity Framework performance, testing, and analysis would be well worth it.
So you do an apprenticeship to learn the basic underlying principals of the trade/profession not to get taught by rote the latest new shiny thing (tm).

Having more people who have been taught properly from first principals rather than only learning the latest trendy thing woudl be a very good idea! You would certainly have less of the "developers who cant program fizz buzz problems"

And I would expect a competent person to be able to pick up mongodb or nodejs even before they had finished the 4 year apprenticeship.

I started my career on the vocational track track (in mech eng) and on my second day at work they said "pop down the the company library there is a book on FORTRAN learn it"
App seems promissing. Will try it later. The illustration IMHO is both unnecessary and cheap looking (clipart style).
The UK gov shares data with the US.
Of course "java audience" in that text should be understood to mean Sun and Oracle management, not, you know, java users and/or developers.
Cryptogeddon game
How much you can relate to the title is very important -- even on HN. Look at the 3 submission titles on HN:

(1) Cryptographer Adi Shamir Prevented from Attending NSA History Conference

(2) How The Government Blocked An Expert From Attending Its Own Cryptology Symposium

(3) Adi Shamir--the "S" in RSA encryption--Prevented from Attending US Crypto Talks

Number 3 (this submission) is getting the exposure the story deserves, and the reason (I think) is that everyone on HN knows what RSA is, and would have respect for its inventors.
A partial list of webrtc tools
My problem with code documentation is that documentation is done at the function or class level. When I'm looking at new code I would prefer a "concept of operations" describing how the whole thing works together rather than piecemeal function documentation.

This is especially important with open source code. I'm not going to donate my time to working with an existing codebase if it is going to take hours to figure out how it all pieces together. Examples are fine but what I really need to know is the why. At least when I put up with this at work I'm getting paid by the hour.
>High-tech ergonomic chair

>Macbook Pro on a flat desk - no mouse, no external keyboard, no keyboard tray, no eye-level monitor.
I looked at their FAQ but even with their answer to "How did the researchers define modern slavery when they were estimating prevalence country by country?" I cannot parse if they should count people in US Prisons that are forced to work on things like license plates and cleaning beaches of oil spills (among other things.)[1]

I wonder what the US ranking would be then.

[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-unit...
Any linguistic-types care to have a shot?

(Sorry if this is construed as an anti-US post. It was just something that stood out to me since I read that article recently)
I work in Times Square. If you don't have a job, it's a place full of stupid tourists who are hemmoraging money and lacking brains. Doing the costume thing isn't really all that different from running a 3 card monte table.
NSA Chief Keith Alexander to Step Down
ok for the illustration. I take note of your feedback. Thanks!

rdubigny
My great grandma died at the age of 94. My grandma said last year in her late 70s "I wish my mom was alive, there are so many things I want to ask her" then started to name the things she wanted to ask her which included "Why didn't she smile in her wedding photo," a photo which has been on the mantle for at least the last 30 years.
It occurs more often than people realise.

My friend was in the US before he had to go out and get his H1B extended. He was stuck outside the country for about 5 months for "additional scrutiny". He got his undergrad, masters and Ph.D. in the US and worked in the area of chemical engineering + spent working 6 months in middle east on water filtration projects.
> If your work can be reduced to such an API

I meant the remote worker builds and maintains an API, not that he himself is an API.

> culture is an extremely important aspect of building a successful business

Yes, maybe; but there are many businesses that are already built and that would benefit from treating some parts of their process as self-enclosed APIs.

I would go so far as saying many already do, without knowing it.
Bitmsg: A Proof-of-Sacrifice distributed, encrypted messaging layer over Bitcoin
http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/

This is the site it references, and probably would have been the better link. It's pretty to look at, but it's not particularly informative if you're looking for a mildly detailed breakdown of what's going on.

They have a faq section which describes what they mean by slavery.
Okay, good points ;-) I may have overstated my case for emphasis; but I maintain that in general, an API is better than a library (there was an article saying just that some time ago on HN; can't seem to find it right now).
Turnkey Tyranny, Surveillance and the Terror State
I came to say this as well, and I don't consider it anti-us...it is simply fact. But what percentage of the 2 million incarcerated adults are doing work? Are all inmates given labor?
+1 to this, whether I'm making a quick fix or intend to do some significant work, if I'm diving into an unfamiliar project I am always overjoyed if I find 'concepts and metaphors' documentation.
That's on Linux, running Mono. Would be interesting to get a more fair comparison wrt language.
If I had to do this, I'd buy and sell a series of cars, driving them to be sold where demand is highest. Design etc is too well served a market, too competitive. You need a market with inefficiencies to exploit.
Of course it is in the researchers best interest to produce a report with as high as possible slave count...

These kinds of reports, which places a definitive number I always take with a pound of salt.
Of course.

This whole debate, which is entirely moot since it's not a criminal trial, arises from the fact that "guilty" and "not guilty" (and "innocent" I guess) have both informal meanings and formal legal meanings, and those meanings are different. The OP used the formal meaning, in a formal context. People tossing about the informal meaning are not adding to the discussion.
It can only share a certain amount under EU Law. There would have to be some sort of criminal threat.
[cloned comment]

Essentially, Quasar provides async and await for all JVM languages. async is called `Fiber.start()`, and await is called `Fiber.park`.
Other than working for all JVM languages, Quasar fibers are more general in that they can spawn many functions (they have a stack), while async is limited to a single expression block. Because of this, we can hide the "await" deep inside the JDBC call stack.

Under the hood, they are similar: both instrument your code. Only async does this at the language level (it's a Scala macro), while fibers do it at the bytecode level.
Didn't that make the headlines some months ago ? I remember something about a teacher writing on behalf of his student. "We give people top education and then prevent them from working in the US and this harms us".
Better TL;DR: Would you rather have 10% of functions commented or 90%? Author argues that 10% is better, if all functions are documented then documentation is obvious, noise, and often wrong. Document the non-obvious cases.
Al Jazeera also did a series on modern slavery (http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/slaverya21stcenturyevil/). The Bonded Slaves episode covers Pakistan and the use of slaves in brick kiln factories. If you're outside the U.S. you can watch it online (from their site or on their YouTube channel). If anyone inside the U.S. wants to watch it, then I'm afraid you're out of luck since we lost online access when Al Jazeera America launched.
PHP 5.5.5 is released
I have no idea which is why I was trying to figure out if they count them or not.

They reckon there are approx 60,000 slaves in the US which would only be a tiny percentage of the 2 million which does not seem to jibe with what else I have read about.
can you use obs to build packages straight from git?
Tarball based build workflows seam rather outdated to me.
Thanks for this response. I think if we implement TogetherJS in our app we'd be doing somewhat-heavy IE testing so in that event we could perhaps send pull requests upstream for any bug fixes.
Alice in Router-land: Down The MP-202 Hole
> People need to look at OpenSUSE again!

Isn't it really beautiful that we actually can do this, now? We can switch platforms within the same day - without real hassle or pain.

I mean tell a Windows or Apple user that they need to look at something else, and guess what their answer will be...
Xubuntu: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/13.10/release/
Does this headline come from the most awesome copywriter we've ever seen?
Probably using -webkit vendor prefixes (can't check for sure, on iPhone)
(Mac OSX): Can anyone explain why 'java --version' still produces java version "1.7.0_17" even though I've updated?

EDIT: Solved. Including this in case anyone runs into it. There are apparently two update mechanisms in OSX (1) From within System Preference->Java Control Panel and (2) By downloading the java file manually from Oracle.

I ran the update "1" from control panel and said system had been updated to U45, but command line didn't reflect that.

After manually downloading and installing JDK from Oracle command line now reflects "1.7.0_45".

I have no idea why this half-baked situation exist, but evidently its how it works....?
Having never heard of this before, I actually read this half-way through and thought it was a highly satirical piece, so I went back here before realizing it's not.

The animations were pretty smooth anyway, but my cursor would skip frames over the content.
I've really struggled to understand why people will stay living in a certain area, unemployed, for years and years. Whether it's in a rustbelt city where the factories have shut down 20 years ago or a rural city where the only jobs are at Walmart or McDonalds, if you give people unemployment pay, they won't move.

I hear all the excuses for them not moving. It's too expensive, they'll uproot their families, etc. Do you think our grandparents didn't have those problems when they moved from the south to the rust belt to take those long-gone factory jobs?

It used to be people moved to where the jobs were. Now they are content to stay where the checks come.
Actually, no. Whatever one can just 'do' for $10k in a month will be risky. This is why credit exists, that's what you need!
Telecom Recharge Plans API 
Telecom Recharge Plans API aggregates plans from the various cellular service providers across all circles in India on a daily basis.
Upwardly mobile? Or stuck in the desktop past?
Happens all the time. A colleague of mine has issues because she happened to have worked in a lab previously whose building also happened to house a lab that did nuclear research (even though she never did any herself). Scientists also move around a lot, so it doesn't help if you've worked in/visited/just been to a conference in certain countries that might arouse suspicion... It's a bit of a nightmare actually.
Java was invented as a full fledged vm with libraries that provide disk access, start and stop processes, taking screenshots etc.

In contrast, Javascript didn't even have these ideas. The only file access it has are through APIs like reading and writing cookies, and file uploads. Another example is Silverlight. Silverlight only provides a limited set of APIs that access the file system. For example, you cannot read any file unless it was initiated through user interaction via OpenFileDialog.

Sandboxing, i.e. preventing untrusted code from calling privileged libraries like disk access through walking the call stack and making sure the call originated from a trusted source. This was tricky but it worked. In Java 7, a new object was invented, called the MethodHandle. This is functions as a first class object, and I suspect that when Oracle bought out the Sun, they lost some key engineers and there has been a slew of exploits via MethodHandle. Hopefully, this patch caught all of them.
> The fundamental problem with tech is that it kills jobs.

> This is why politicians are wrong to try to solve unemployment with tech.

The second does not follow from the first. Technology will always be killing jobs, and local politicians can do nothing to prevent that. The only difference they can make is where the profits from the old jobs go to; if they just stand by and watch, they will all go to companies in a few global tech centres, most in the US. However, if they encourage the development of a local tech scene, the efficiency problem might be solved by local entrepreneurs, meaning that they can still tax the profits, etc., making the local population better off.

Also, I strongly disagree with your claim that "We are wired to work". We are raised to work. And by "we", I mean particularly the people far away from the equator, who always needed to work to survive. Personally, I would not work if I didn't need it for survival (or more free time in the future), and I'm certain there's many more people like me in the world. Why do you think kids play in their free time, and teenagers party?
Very nice. I really love 2012 and the 2013 RC was pretty solid as well. The step up from 2010 was the most pronounced, as 2012 just runs circles around 2010 in (albeit, my own anecdotal) performance.

Just gotta wait for an upgrade license of R# to go on sale, as R#7 isn't compatible with 2013 ;(
I wouldn't even go that far. "API" and "Library" are not distinct concepts. A library has an API - it's the set of public functions (ideally rarely changing) that you are supposed to call from external programs. It is beneficial if one developer can hide their work behind a simple interface with only a few access points (the API), but there is no compelling reason this should be json over http.

The real distinction between a network API and a library is that the network API allows users to avoid thinking about the hardware. The API provider is responsible for allocating hardware, the user need only send messages over the network to use it. I.e., buying hard drives is Amazon's problem, I just GET/PUT my files onto S3.

If the API isn't hardware intensive, this is pointless - you are adding network overhead (i.e., latency, network errors) for nothing.
This is an ever ongoing discussion between two kinds of programmers (documenting and non-documenting). Just decide for yourself or your team what works best. I myself like to even document other people's code after I see what the method does if the method isn't speaking for itself. If I am developing I want to see in my IDE when adding an existing method, a popup which tells me quickly about what the method does and the arguments it has and what it returns. Instead of (everytime) having to jump to the code to see what it does.

Just one simple (real life) example:

public String convertText(String text) {
return text.toUpperCase();
}

This method is already named wrong in my opinion and should be refactored to something like convertTextToUpperCase to understand what it does without having to document. But if your methods get more complex I think a little comment on top of the method describing what's going on really cannot harm. Especially if the code is difficult to read for new people.

The point is in the end to keep the documentation in sync with the code and that takes indeed some effort. I myself always make documentation for a method in Java-doc style, so only above the method, if it's more complex than a simple getter/setter-method. I always tend to think in terms of the official Sun Java API-documentation, which I use(d) so often to know how all the classes/methods work, that it might also make my own code more readable/understandable when I or someone else has to work on my code if I have documented it. Inside the method code I try to comment little to not.

@snowwolf: I agree, but it's just an example to show that a method name should speak for itself
If you want to break up with the US on the web you need to do at least two things (and probably many more).

1. Start laying (more) cables between countries that do not pass through US territory. [1]

2. Encourage home-grown innovation and services so that people are not all using services under authority of US sovereignty.

[1] And try and stop the US from tapping them...

Good luck...
Looks interesting, thanks for sharing! While I didn't had time yet to read it, I took a look and using the bible as a reference to proof if something is true or not is also questionable. I never read "The Secret" myself and never understood the buzz that was going on a few years ago.

Hope to read this article soon, but just that point about the bible that is quiet disappointing - I didn't yet read the article, so we never know what he's mentioning that...
> I think the improvements we'd get in Entity Framework performance

Technically, that's not a VS2012 or 2013 feature, that comes from .NET 4.5, which you can use with VS 2010.

However, the testing and analysis is well worth it. I don't know what your source control is, but paired with TFS 2012, it's a pretty large productivity improvement for my team over VS 2010 (as large as you can get from an IDE upgrade).
VS2012 took out installer projects (instead telling you to just use InstallShield), SQLCLR projects, was incompatible with Oleg Sych's T4 Toolbox plug-in, and had a colour-scheme in the TFS source browser that made my eyes want to bleed.

Every other VS upgrade has been comparatively painless. I can't say I'm excited to try VS2013.
Remote learning for primary school requires a significant amount of time on the part of the parent, and lots of communal time for the children so that they develop adequate social skills.

Prefab has been a force particularly in commercial and industrial construction in the US for some time. My company has done a lot of work in the design and construction of standardized/commoditized hospital rooms, for example. It makes construction like an exercise in Legos :-)