skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it we were discussing a greater interstellar human civilization, (and let's face it, the idea of aliens is silly) there is one additional interesting problem: the time dilation colonist experience will mean they will be permanently behind the Earth by a number of years equal to the distance they travel. And their knowledge will be double that obsolescence.

For example: they leave at the speed of light for a star 50 light years away. On Earth 50 years pass but no time passes for the colonist. So when they arrive they are technically where the earth was 50 years before. They set up shop and transmit their wonderful ideas and technology, which takes 50 more years to be received. Which means it's 100 years out of date.

Meanwhile the Earth beams its ideas to the colonists. Even on they day the land, the colonist can tune into their favorite sitcom without missing an episode (because of course they were traveling side by side with those transmissions and the subsequent fifty years were following behind in a lovely tail of vapid entertainment). So the Earth's information is still quite useful to them.

And this disparity in value can never be corrected. If the Earth moans about the uselessness of the colonist 100 year old ideas and sends suggestions, the colonist will have been listening to the Earth for 100 years anyway before they hear those suggestions and will already moved far beyond them. Yet still be 50 years behind.

So a trade in ideas also seems unworkable.
Yes, I've had that one too. I have a Logitech keyboard case, but if I'm not writing long-form, I find it more comfortable to have the "bare" iPad, and tap out any shorter text. Unless I specifically disconnect the keyboard through the iOS settings panel first, I don't get the software keyboard back.

By contrast, in iOS 6, if the BT keyboard disconnected for any reason, (i.e. power-off/range) the software keyboard would instantly reappear.
If we're going all the way, "little" may be offensive to people with a growth disorder, and "child" is age discrimination, the whole combination implying that only children can be small and scared.

tl;dr, stop being so politically correct everyone, sheesh.
Silencing an error like that is catastrophic.

Silencing an error would be a problem, but in JS, it's not an error, because there's no concept of "wrong numbers of function arguments" built into the language. That's not to say you can't inspect the number of arguments yourself and throw an error, if some situation warrants it. But you don't have to do this. It's a very flexible, dynamic language. In some ways this flexibility makes things easier and more expressive, in other ways it necessitates more manual checking (or slower debugging). There's no catastrophe, just design differences.
Show HN: Gmelius – No Ads and Better User Interface for Gmail
I'd like to point out that your amendments do not solve the problems you mention, as they fail to include how your choices affect others. A variant of the two-body problem, if you will.

Let's pick drugs. Half of the drugs regulations deal with keeping you from killing yourself, which your approach would simplify (although sounds like a variant of "let's solve stupidity by removing warning labels and let the problem sort itself"). The other half, however, is how this change would affect society as a whole, and drug addicts are a burden on society (see: homelessness, hospital costs, correlation with violent crimes, impaired drivers hurting others, etc).

Of course, we know you would never become a dangerous addict lying in the streets arguing with yourself, but you can be damn right that I almost certainly would. And that's why, as I see it, Society (represented by the Government) jumps in and says "no drugs for either of you".

The other points follow a similar line of thinking.
Awesome site! It would be great if you added a link to Sourcegraph there. We're going to have language-specific homepages (sourcegraph.com/ruby) and I can let you know when that's ready if you would prefer to link to that.
Shadow Mapping with SlimDX and DirectX 11
Computable (real) numbers are a countable subset of the reals and represent the largest set we can analytically reason about; however, equality of computable numbers is not itself computable-- you can have computable c1 and c2 where cmp(c1, c2) is nonterminating (which means that c1 == c2 but it cannot be shown to be so in finite time).

I'd argue that, for most people's tastes, computable analysis is wonkier than real analysis, even if the latter has uncountable infinities (which is rarely considered a problem).
Sexism... by replacing "girl" with "boy"? Equally sexist.

By replacing "boy/girl" with "child"? Ageism.

By replacing boy/girl/child with "person"? Humanism.

Yes I can go on.
Thank you! I was thinking about the same thing during the hype and could not remember the name of the company.
I have always wondered why so many people like dynamically types languages... I mean, if I have a variable I ALWAYS know what kind of data I expect in it. If I try to use different kinds of data in the same variable then something is clearly wrong - either with me (for wanting that) or with the way I use the variable (and I would appreciate some warning about it).

The problem is that you hardly have a choice nowadays. Python, JS and PHP are dynamic, Java is a great language but crappy concept (don't tell me it isn't slooo... <wait for GC... ok, done> ...ow). Ironically, the ugliest language I have ever coded in (ObjectiveC) has the best design decisions (IMHO). ARC instead of manual memory management or GC, strongly typed but still allows generic object pointer (id),...
Why don't you tell your boss to provide you with the same perks and working conditions Apple or Google employees receive?
Who says "JS is slow"? It might even be the single most heavily optimized scripting language ever. Given that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla work on high performance JS VMs (half of them open source) and in a public competition with benchmarks and claims for fastest browsing experience.

Performance was one of the selling points of Node.JS for me.
How is it possible to submit the same URL twice?
It's not censorship at all, it's the moderation of the forum maintained by the company. If I would maintain my forum I'd also delete the comments that are aggressive, overblown, conspiracy-insane etc, for example. I'd also know it's hard to win: only a few weirdos (and internet makes it really easy for them to be visible) are enough to waste the time of more people, but it's still a nice goal: better a few people on the payroll deleting the comments than the thousands or even millions of users being distracted, creating the new conspiracy theories or organizing lynching.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

In short, "do it in your own forum, I reserve the right to delete your posts in mine, and by participating, you're acknowledging my right."

If you did any real-life engineering, you know there isn't anything that can be produced without any glitches. You are aware that your product isn't perfect, but you still wouldn't want to support aggression in your own forums. Due to the different laws in different countries, who should you personally contact to solve the problem varies so even such answers in globally-read thread which should be purely technical can be inappropriate. In European countries it's very regulated and clear, for example. I don't know how it's in US.

What's certainly clear is that nobody would even want the forums without the active moderation, except the spammers and the insane.
Hylas-Lisp - A JIT-compiled Lisp targeting LLVM
Yes! For that reason, I also have my own: https://github.com/albertz/binstruct
Missing / at the end
Very intriguing. I hope you pursue this, if anyone I think you're the right man for the job.
The most evil gaming easter eggs in history
Thanks for opening the issue. I'm not on github at the moment (or, rather, I am but don't want to link my profile there to my one here), but to answer the question my $TERM is "ansi". I'll keep checking the issue page for any updates in future.

Edit: I can confirm that changing $TERM to "xterm-256color" removes the issue.
This book is the first thing I though of reading this.

I don't know about the viability of the sort of economy Charles Stross uses in this book, but I found it refreshingly thought through. Might also be worth noting that he goes into some interesting concepts with regards to cryptocurrencies.
"Some people are irresponsible" does not justify the universal deployment of terrible and profound oppression such as you describe.

Indeed, we have attempted it. Remember prohibition? We still have myriad addicts, have wasted unconscionable amounts of money, and senselessly ruined staggering amounts of lives attempting to pretend that society has claims to or on the physical body of an individual.

If the "burden on society" argument was in any way real, cigarettes and alcohol would be outlawed. It's simply a red herring.
I'll make a slight addendum: Most people have an email address if they frolic online, however I rarely meet people who prefer to conduct communications over it. Of course, they need one for FB or Twitter either way, but...

Either they go to FB or DM over Twitter or some other "social thing", but they view email as far more cumbersome. This is especially true with family these days as the first question I get is, "are you on Facebook". It's an inescapable part of society nowadays in that they view the site as something-other-than-internet and more user-friendly, more quick and more "connected", if that's the operative word, than email.

Sending/receiving text is over FB chat is still viewed as preferable to the not so straightforward method of email. Even the venerable IRC is viewed as less acceptable; "wait, don't I need a client or something for that? Won't I get viruses and stuff?" Never mind the fact that they still need a mobile client to chat over FB or Twitter, but they view it as "it came with the phone".

Bottom line: FB and Twitter have taken over communication where email once ruled for the vast majority of people I interact with. They can't be bothered with email, but they still are my friends and family.
The nastier issue isn't interstellar trade but interstellar conquest. Trade between stars is very expensive, even for a fairly sophisticated civilization (think of the opportunity costs of waiting decades for a package from interstellar Amazon to arrive!). It's usually much cheaper to make things from local materials and swap data packets with your stellar neighbors.

The problem, of course, is that eventually you might well exhaust the resources of your local solar system. A sufficiently long-lived civilization will do so, no matter how sustainable they are, unless they manage some kind of trick to conquer entropy or basic conservation laws.

Which means you'll need a worked-out interstellar legal framework for laying claim to uninhabited solar systems as destinations for colonies when the time comes to "move house".

And all of this is presuming you're operating at a high enough level of technology and civilization to even gain entry to the Interstellar Club in the first place.
Any oral or written communication between humans or machines has a probability P to influence thoughts or opinions of human agents engaged in communication or machines that are able to learn.

Marketers are increasing P to reach their business goals. Actions taken to increase P may have positive or negative externalities. For example, edX uses Google Adwords and remarketing to spread awareness about free moocs from Harvard, MIT, etc. This is an example of an action with a positive externality. Thus I demonstrate that subset of marketers that are trying to change opinions is beneficial to society, even if they are pursuing their own agenda.

I respectfully reject your statement that you are not trying to change my opinion or opinions of other HN readers. See my first argument for justification.
It's still a programmer error when they accidentally call a function with 2 arguments when they meant to call it with 3. The fact that the language can't inform them of the error doesn't change that.
After a long period of meaning to, I'm currently about half-way through Dune, and enjoying it.
Turkish Government has an API. You post all the info on the ID to it, and it returns true or false. You have to be a legal entity in Turkey to access it. (Edit: Correction, everyone can access it, and it doesn't require all the info anymore, just ID number, name and birthday. https://tckimlik.nvi.gov.tr/Service/KPSPublic.asmx?op=TCKiml...)

I'm guessing there are other countries that provides this?
he is just upset and expressing himself after a painful ordeal. I'm sure that wasn't what he said to the guys at the gate. In fact his frustration stems from the fact that he was dealt with so badly - which to me implies that he has a different understanding of what customer serviceshould be like. Anyways - dont waste your time making ad hominem comments - the point was that Air France treats people like crap - so unless you have to fly with them - pick another airline.
"but to do so with a much more radical design."

Now this is interesting. Working on anything!
- GWT
- Dart
- ClojureScript
For me, so far no. Even after the Spotlight indexing, I've noticed a very significant decrease in battery life after upgrading. I don't know why, and the Power tab in Activity Monitor doesn't give any hints. It doesn seem that the fans are also running more frequently than they used to, even on battery power.
Flashing Blue Light Specials Don't Work to Build Startup Communities
Why? Sorting strings is a far more common thing to do than just sorting numbers, so it makes sense to use simple string comparisons as the default algorithm. Rather than come up with something that first evaluates the types in the list and then tries to figure out what to do.
Access to the automated system for distribution of communication materials is NOT equal for selling data. Thats a common misconception.

Also extended analytics do not provide any private data that is not available in the general version of analytics.
> I've been playing around with it a bit...

Tell us more!
> I think it would be fun to take another run at the same problem — attempt to find a minimal, readable, and easier-to-learn language that fits in the same role as JavaScript — but to do so with a much more radical design.

Do you think ClojureScript could fit this category? We have teams that use it in production without any significant problems at all.
14 hours... That's nice, how did you do that so fast?
The same argument could be made for house hold locks.

An experienced lock smith could open an average house hold lock in probably minutes. (not to forget most people are neither skilled lock smiths nor photoshop editors)

That doesn't mean a locked home isn't secure. Most people would never think about breaching such a social contract and breaking in locks.

If one wants to break in or if one wants to lie, one can always do. Most people would never do; for the rest, it is a different problem really.
I feel like I spend 90% of my time banging my head against a brick wall.

Why do people want to work with a technology like that?

Personally I feel that the worst part of programming is when you're stuck trying to decipher the inner workings of an intermediate layer. It's so frustrating and futile, and I'm not learning anything generally useful because mastering arcane workarounds for technology layer X doesn't translate to anything else.

I'll much rather work with technology that doesn't make me feel magically productive 10% of the time, but does make me actually productive 99% of the time. There are plenty of those around.
In JS, sending the "wrong" number of arguments is frequently a feature. There's no concept of language-level function overloading, and it allows for the authorship of functions that take a variable or unbounded number of arguments (useful when coding in a functional paradigm).
> No, it does not. You could define the exact same default function in Java, Haskell (requiring that the sorted type be a Show instance) or Python (hell, getting the exact same behavior in Python could hardly be simpler: `ar.sort(key=str)`

I don't use JavaScript but to me this looks like a really broken implementation over weak typing. Of course, this isn't a trait of the typing system per se as it is a trait of the "interface", if you will, that it offers to the programmer.

What OP was probably annoyed by was the typical excuse the JS community offers for this behaviour: "it's weakly-typed so you can treat the arguments as anything you want". This misses the point of having a weak typing system: instead of using it to infer the type of the arguments and get a sane default comparison function, avoiding the verbosity typical of strongly-typed languages (where you have to specify the comparison function with the correct type signature), you have to specify the comparison function for anything that isn't a string. Bummer :-(.

I hope I haven't missed anything here; as I said, I'm not quite fluent in JavaScript.
Chasing the storm through Internet connections
Eeeks!.. i just updated to Mavericks last night.. i hope i do not face the same issue.
CoffeeScript was obviously inspired by Ruby. While CS is great, I've never gotten over the usage of "->" or "=>" to signify a function. To me, Ruby's "def" or "do" reads so much better. Especially with "end", to signify a barrier, as opposed to whitespace. Have you considered porting Ruby directly to JavaScript?

By the way, thanks for your work on _ & Backbone!
Good point. In my country the government didn't even issue ID cards until 2009 or so, and government-issued IDs are still very very uncommon. Here you typically get your ID from your bank.
I buy more milk twice a week, so no.

I am capable of buying every single item in soylent individually and combining them. I am also capable of going to a farmer's market every single morning and cleaning, preparing, and cooking three fresh, square, delicious, healthy, nutritious meals every single day.

I just don't fucking want to.

Optimizing is saying no to things.

I think the creator of soylent put it best: "less time cooking and cleaning means more time for music and math".
Where did you find this encrypted decentralized p2p email service?

Edit: I guess there is a obvious solution, you and all your friends hosts personal mail-servers, correct?
In fairness, PayPal, being a money transmitter, has to deal with regulations more complicated and onerous than anyone who hasn't worked in that business can ever know or understand, so there isn't any basis for holding them to blame for such things.

Facebook has no such excuse.
Why operator “is” and “==” are sometimes interchangeable for strings?
The Value of Value Propositions
> That might well be, but the default sort comparison function is not a demonstration of it.

Yes it is. It demonstrates weak typing which I also think is broken. If I wanted to sort a string, I would have done this:

> ["1","2","3"].sort()

> (hell, getting the exact same behavior in Python could hardly be simpler: `ar.sort(key=str)`. There, I broke it.

You broke it by writing more code. That's good. Javascript is broken __unless__ you write additional code. That's the crux of the matter.
This article reads like this comic: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rock_band.png

goes back to happily writing JavaScript
It helps that it's a great looking product as well, if I had kids I'd be majorly tempted to buy.
I'm so tired of hearing how bad JS is as a language - guess what, it doesn't metter. The ecosystem and community is absolutely amazing and that's something you just can't beat - all the well documented, polished and maintaned libraries, frameworks etc, the amount of books, guides, conferences and so on, the ability to use JS everywhere, tools, services, cloud based solutions and much, much more. That's why people create all the amazing stuff and all of this results in one of the most important things - development speed. Sure, JS has a lot of quirks you need to be aware of and it's easy to write bad JS, but with some experience, you can rapidly write a maintainable, easy to read, flexible and modular code.
> a function is not an object, not a datastructure that can carry data

Wait, what? That's the definition of a closure.

Most of this seems to boil down to the author saying "my programming brain was hardwired by Ruby, and I'm annoyed JavaScript is different." OK, I feel your frustration. As a reader, though, I'd far rather see a post from someone who has spent the time to become proficient in both ecosystems and can offer more considered pro/cons.

On one point, I'll agree: I wish Javascript had an easy way to say "referencing an undefined property of this object should throw an error."
Starbucks Lets You Buy Coffee for a Friend via Twitter
Interesting idea, thoughts on securing commerce like this over Twitter?
My school exposed me to HTML, VB, and later in high school, C and C++.
I got interested in website development, so I started with ASP, but quickly moved to PHP because it is easier to get free hosting (I was still a kid with no money!). I learned everything from my school library books, and free online resources.

I was exposed to Java and C# in my computer science engineering course, but I never actually learned much apart from the basics which I needed for the course itself. Ironically, I didn't pick up on the very things which I was thought formally.

I learned basic javascript and more PHP stuff (MVC, OOP, templates et all) when I got a chance to intern in a small start up. I did a few small freelance jobs after that.

I learned some basic Python and Ruby by myself, and learned advanced Javascript when I got exposed to Node.js. I learned more Ruby when I got a small Ruby/Sinatra gig. More Node.js when I got employed as a Node.js developer. MongoDB/Redis/everything else was mostly on the job.

Linux/Bash was a lot of experimentation, and a lot of practice.

As you can see, the pattern is that I learned mostly by myself: By trying to do things, and by using online resources. I never read a full book (apart from the Javascript the Good Parts), and never finished a full online course. I learned as I worked.

I am not condoning this method, and I don't know if its the best, but it's what worked for me.
Never Null - Safe Navigation of Javascript Objects
SMACCMPilot: open-source UAV autopilot using high-assurance software methods
The app isn't really polished yet, so we deliberately kept it out of the play store for now. The app does have its own updater, so once you installed it, it should stay current.

Of course we are thinking about adding it to the play store, but there is no concrete timeline yet.
> Yes it is. It demonstrates weak typing which I also think is broken.

For the third time, no. There is no implicit conversion process during the comparison, the default comparison is explicitly specified to convert both of its arguments to strings before doing the comparison.

Javascript does not trigger conversions to compare two numbers, so relying on the type system would actually do exactly what you want.

> You broke it by writing more code.

Meanwhile you completely missed the point of posting the snippet.

> Javascript is broken __unless__ you write additional code.

And as I replied the first time around, I have no objection with the assertion that the default sort comparison function is garbage, I have an issue with your assertion that it is a consequence of weak typing because it is not.
While I agree JS is a shitty language overall, and worst when writer larger apps.

Having someone who wrote this on a website that spend 30% of the screen estate for page footer isn't very convincing.