skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, I don't think its a matter of right or wrong. They have a right to decide whatever they think is best. I'm just trying to understand it.

You are right though, it is what it is. I suppose I am just interested in understanding why people do what they do, and this was an intriguing topic of personal relevance to me, and I assumed potentially to others here at this particular moment. But, I agree speculation on the topic is exhausted at this point. Thanks for humoring me anyways.
This site is literally just a black page for me on Chromium/Crunchbang.
Yeah, RMS shouldn't have bothered making a free version of UNIX. Linus shouldn't have have made a free, sub-standard version of MINIX.

The Dovecot devs shouldn't have made Dovecot when we already had UW IMAP. Postfix is redundant, we've had Sendmail for decades.

They all should really have done something original instead.
You still need to write functions ,that's the issue. => functions will make things a bit better,but await and generator syntax are the key to solve some issues.
I’m actually considering moving a bit further from Amsterdam, because the amount of time I spend on the train is just a tiny bit too short for reading. Added bonus: I’d live next to the sea!

(but I also willingly increase the commute time by picking a „wrong” train station, to have a longer cycling leg of the commute)
Oops. What a Hypocrisy? The moral righteous Google. Little People vs Big People? Please stop. Don't do Evil still works for you guys.. I guess.

You have the resources to defend it, if you want to defend. You choose not to in many ways.

So please dont explode in profanity several times a day.
At least we can agree that a driver is non-trivial.
How about a program that calls a C library?

The only project I know of that publishes in multiple languages, vtd-xml - the C++ library has 40k lines of code versus C which is 60k. I don't dispute that C can be more verbose - but it's not a stretch of the imagination to think there's a program somewhere out there that meets Stroustrup's requirements better in C than C++.

Not sure at what point we will have a certain agreement on what is trivial and what isn't. Here's an example of someone writing a lot of code to wrap a C library in to C++, and then doing a few calls to it.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/6343/CppSQLite-C-Wrapper...
I've contributed to a little JS lib [1] that takes a similar approach, but expands all of its predicates with two modifiers: a `maybe` modifier that tolerates null and undefined; and a `verify` modifier that throws if the predicate returns false. I've found it quite useful for eradicating some common boilerplate from my code.

e.g.:

var check = require('check-types');
check.unemptyString(''); // returns false
check.maybe.unemptyString(); // returns true
check.verify.unemptyString(''); // throws Error
check.verify.maybe.unemptyString(); // doesn't throw

[1] https://github.com/philbooth/check-types.js
Ask HN: What is your favorite gmail alternative?
Looking for a light and simple email host as an alternative to the now bulky gmail/google complex.
You mention family a bunch, and I think that's important.

If you are 20 and single, and staying late in the office means pizza and a bit of XBox with your team later on, it is genuinely much nicer than going back to your empty little apartment and microwaving an instant meal.

If you have a family, then regardless of how much you like XBox, if you are a decent person you will run out the door at 5.

I'm young and irresponsible. When I glance round the office at 8pm, and see a guys I know have baby children working free over time like every other night, I want to shake them.
I've started with (bad) static typing in C, Pascal and friends, then got to use the dynamic Lisp and Python. But now I'm at (good) static typing again with Haskell (and OCaml).

Good static typing saves you about half the units tests. And you don't even have to worry too much about that `half' being correct, because the type machinery in your compiler has been checked by thousands of people before. Whereas your tests are normally written from scratch.

Types also make your testing life much easier. QuickCheck is about the gold standard in rules based testing, and QuickCheck in a type-inferred language is just so much less verbose than when you have to either manually add all type annotiations or have to go without types. (That's mostly because Haskell allows overloading by return type.)
Previous to that, it was a repressive dictatorship which was funded by the USA for many years...
Thanks for pointing that out, I had heard horror stories before and was willing to take 17.77% at face value!
IMHO as long as it has states, and it actually accepts some input while rejecting others, it is a computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_computation

EDIT: Thus a printer IS a computer, not for the procedural operations, but for that you can feed in some illegal input through the interface(no matter serial, peripheral or USB), and it will either send you back some complaint, or disconnect from you, or burn itself down.
Just because people don't vote the way you want them to doesn't mean it's not working.
Crowdfunded audit of 'NSA-proof' encryption suite TrueCrypt is GO
Ad hominem aisde, your edit seems to actively counter your other point.

My whole point is that both sites spin a narrative a certain way because they both would like history to look a certain way. The reason why I "extensively quote" an external source is to show that there are other elements involved in the perception of truth than just the given data points.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with pointing out inaccurate data. However, there seems to be a general propensity to then discount a whole narrative in favour of the seemingly corrected narrative of the person doing the corrections. The whole point of bringing up the underlying bias of any historical account, however, is to just keep in mind that all correction is capable of doing is to erect another narrative. Which one you find more convincing is entirely yours to decide. I merely (or, perhaps, "merely") contest that what happens in the review is an opposition of (semi-)fiction on one hand and "historical truth" on the other.
Another good article. It has not changed my mind, however :)

As someone who values making scientific decisions, I would challenge you to survey people in the tech industry (programmers, visual designers, UX experts, etc) and ask them if they know what an "Experience Architect" does.

It is difficult enough that some people don't know that user interaction and user experience are jobs different from a graphic designer and front end developer. But I think user interaction and UX are at least somewhat known. As you said: "If you do information and interaction and UX, go with “UX” as a job title."

It sounds like "UX Designer and Information Architect" might be accurate in your case? And it sounds almost as impressive as "Experience Architect" :)
An OpenSource Toolkit for P2P Platforms and Markeplaces Design
The destruction of the Guardian's laptops was about ensuring they didn't get stolen by someone else - if you read the story at the time, the spooks actually wanted the Guardian to hand the laptops over but Guardian refused and destruction was a mutually agreed way out.

Miranda's detainment, confiscation of the memory sticks etc was to be expected - as far as the UK Government is concerned he's carry stolen state secrets.

What I don't really understand is why he flew through London carrying them, I believe Madrid has more routes to South American - I wonder if he was routed so he would be picked up for massive publicity.
The bug that let me tweet from any Twitter account
But have you used statically typed langauges? Unless you've used both you won't be aware of the advantages.

The big one for me is inheriting other people's code bases, in dynamic languages they're a complete and utter nightmare, especially when written by incompetent programmers, which seems to make up a worryingly large number of programmers. Or someone just learning and not aware of conventions.

You just can't assume a method or function actually does what it says it does. Or returns what it says it does. And you can't even see what it's expecting or what things are being passed to it. You have to fine-toothcomb the method, it slows you down massively.

I have worked on a fair few bad code bases now and luckily for me the majority of that's been in static languages. It makes it so much easier.

Some of the other advantages of static typing include:

1. having incredibly good auto code completion

2. never having to remember or look up a method signature

3. to refactor massive chunks of code almost completely fearlessly

4. to fix crap code without any fear of breaking anything else

5. as long as you name your methods well, never having to annotate anything mundane (depending on your audience ofc)

There are also other things like that tend to go hand-in-hand because they're usually explicit, like not worrying about implicit conversion (apart from VB with option explicit off).

I've used both quite a lot over the last 10 odd years professionally programming and I've recently been thinking that I would actually prefer a mix, static typing on boundaries like method entry and new object declartion and dynamic everywhere else. I know little about compiler or language design, so I'm not sure it's even possible. C# kinda gets close with the var keyword, but the various disadvantages of static typing still rear their head quite a lot.

As a slight aside, People on HN always seem to talk as if they only write new programs, not maintain old ones. Am I the weird one for frequently having to pick up code that was written by someone else? Who often had coded themselves into a corner and then made up some excuse as to why they couldn't keep the client anymore?
The Time Travelling Designer and other stories of Agile Design | Made by Many
It's definitely high up on the todo list. First finalize the API and release production worthy builds, then all those additional little add ons!
I'd like to second this - I ran the same stats once, while contracting for a customer with excessive demands.

I found that a week of working long hours was about my max, and after that I started making mistakes to the point that the extra hours actually became counter productive.
Google Developers is down
"That was the lasting legacy of the Rodney King acquittals: you can do what you want if you're a cop."

To a propagandized society, yes, that the revolutionary truth about the initial acquittals. The bourgeois truth is that the LAPD police academy cheaped out on baton training, excluding the normal sections that would have allowed them to restrain King with a minimum of force.

Given that, they had exactly three choices: shoot him like a dog, beat him into submission, or I suppose let him free to commit more crimes while intoxicated.

I guarantee you the message sent by the second prosecution in an area and situation where conviction was much more likely (2 out of 3) has had a lot of very bad effects, including the police resorting to their firearms a lot more.

"Eventually, 400M Americans are going wake up, realize that they've had enough, and effect real, lasting change."

Perhaps all this will help you understand why we're buying guns of military utility at unprecedented rates? With the exception of last August, for around 40 months NICS tracked guns sales have been higher than those of the preceding month a year previously (source is the NSSF). Note that the starting point of this massive surge is well beyond the period of fear that Obama would take effective gun control steps and way before Newtown.

It's ... amazing. The world's stocks of $150 (in today's prices) standard bolt action military surplus rifles have been exhausted, that's from more than a century's production of them.

I'm not sure if we're gearing up for a civil war/general resistance to this sort of shit, the inevitable consequences of the government running out of money, or things less dire in the runup to one or both, but we're getting thoroughly prepared, which should terrify the police-judicial complex. And may well be doing so.

As I and other keep saying, this will not end well.
HN has a bias towards what's currently in. Windows 8 is not really cool to the startup crowd, so it gets ignored. I saw the app and it looks nice. So, good job!
If you want to get HNs attention, you must use node.js with Mongo and write blog post full with buzzwords. Then title it something like: "Show HN: Google Analtics app in Node.js/MongoDB"
With Typical[1], I took a different approach enforcing types on the functions.

[1]: https://github.com/mattneary/Typical
We use MaxCDN. It seems to work well, but I find all CDNs fairly opaque. How can I actually measure latency? I can't with web browsers being the way they are, so I really have no way of knowing. (There is http://www.w3.org/TR/navigation-timing/ but it is very limited, and not suitable for us.)

Clarification psated from a comment I made below:

Sure, I can test my latency, but I'm more interested in what my customers are experiencing. For instance, we have a big customer over in east Asia and I have very little idea what latency they get. When we were using Cloudfront a customer in Australia complained that they were seeing timeouts. It seems there was a bug in Amazon's routing table as Cloudfront has a POP in Sydney but their requests were going somewhere much further away.
China is a much more hostile state actor in how it would use any information it gathers up, especially to a free-enterprise company like Google.
Engineers probably feel the same way about software developers.
Not quite, our trial by jury system is far from being corrupted. In a real police state like e.g. Japan the police don't worry too much about how they close a case, for they know whoever they charge will get convicted.
I'd argue that post-PRISM, there's a big opportunity to re-create self-hosted options for services known to be open books to the government. It might not be creative, but it does provides users a familiar alternative to storing their data in the cloud.
Is a rant what would you expect?
Very nice interface. Kudos.
9,000 Uniques in One Day: A Viral Marketing Case Study
AWS: Ten Things You're Probably Doing Wrong as an Architect
Very cool. I also love http://tympanus.net/Development/AnimatedCheckboxes/
This isn't really relevant to your point or to the discussion, but this is not the first time I've heard of these kinds of improvements in compile time:

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4410261&cid=4533254...

Obviously, what's being compiled is not exactly equivalent but the time difference is startling.
anti-gamer hit pieces are common, yes. I mean, as common as something about a vaguely not popular culture can be (beside people that play windows solitare or facebook stuff, people here rarely game at all, gamers here usually are quite alien to everyone else, maybe because games here are crazy expensive, ie: see PS4 2000 USD)

And my game was a Arkanoid clone of sorts, but I never finished it actually, the version on the arcade cabinet was more of a prototype, also I was writing about it and I was going to put the engine source on github, but I never had time to do it, and the machine with that stuff is not near me (I left it in my parents house to start my own startup in other city).

But the site is http://paddlewars.agfgames.com mind you it is a really ugly site, and the game is quite unfinished, but you can download the desktop version of it and play a bit (also the desktop version is older than the arcade version, back then I had no version control and managed to lose the arcade version source).

Oh, and the cabinet was made for the code, not the code for the cabinet! The cabinet thus has its features designed around the game (for example it has a trackball and eight buttons, to match the game control scheme).

Here is a photo: http://coderofworlds.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/mauricio...

The guy in red is a journalist.

Also I made a mistake on the design of that cabinet: I designed it thinking about the average height of most people here... and forgot kids, it became common to pass by the game and see a couple of chairs around it with kids on top of the chairs playing.
mm yes id like that nice two bed flat in red lion square in London but i dont have a spare million or so to hand.
Just write "disco" anywhere in the page.
The creator left a surprise. Cool webGL work.
The problem is that "design perspective" implies that you indeed mean that you are good at "drawing something pretty" or following trends. Otherwise, everything that involves building things to solve problems is design. In fact, I never understood what the clear distinction between design and engineering is. What is a "non-design perspective"? Trying to do something that doesn't work?

Yes, I know there's a theory of design -- I believe there are several, actually -- but I honestly don't care if you are unable to explain where this theory comes from, how it's validated and so on. And I apply the same criteria to engineering and science, by the way. Otherwise its just arguing from authority.
Senate committees to hold hearings regarding virtual currency issues
I have been using CDN77.com, you should check them out. Custom SSL is 699 dollars but the performance is really good.
The differentiation between a "hollywood narrative" and the "attempt at an accurate account", however, brings us a new set of problems: Who gets to decide which is which? Do we have to rely on authorial intention? Do we rely on reception?

Either way doesn't allow us to qualify what kind of effort we have at hand without grounding said qualification on our own biases. If we believe that the account is fundamentally flawed, we are free to assume that a hollywood narrative has been deliberately crafted to misrepresent "historical truth" (which would be the Bezos side). If we believe that the account is fundamentally correct, regardless of bias and some factual flaws, then we have to assume that the intent behind it was to give an accurate account of history.

My whole point is that neither authorial intention nor pure reception can offer us a definitive assessment of a given accounts "truthfulness" or overall expressed content. Consequently, this lets me regard both sides as biased. Both have an agenda, and both represent things a certain way, thus necessarily misrepresenting others in the process. Who I think is more believable in their account is then a question of my own choice, depending on my own inclinations, biases and presuppositions.

P.S.: I do not regard any of the quoted bits as a theory that is to be applied. Instead, they introduce two distinct elements: reflexion and self-reflexion. Theory thus introduces a mode of thought, not a structural base for analysis. White's own categories are certainly structural (and structuralist) and to be applied, but they are crafted for his own analysis of the history of historiography (and therefore notably absentin my quotations. They, however, are not the transferable meaning that is valid in for more contexts than just his intended analyses.
But how much of the core infrastructure is made by the Chinese?
Fixing the symptom.
I am surprised this exerpt from Alan Rusbriger's article in the New York Review of Books [1] hasn't made the rounds:

> "But I did have an interesting (unattributable, of course) briefing from someone very senior in one West Coast mega-corporation who conceded that neither he nor the CEO of his company had security clearance to know what arrangements his own organization had reached with the US government. “So, it’s like a company within a company?” I asked. He waved his hand dismissively: “I know the guy, I trust him.”

West Coast mega-corporation does not know what West Coast mega-corporation does.

[1] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/snowden...
Pingdom's response time report is really nice. We also used LoadImpact to test it against "flash mobs" :)
This is probably setting the requirements a bit too high for the average site - requiring a unique SSL certificate from their CDN provider.

Most sites will probably be fine using SSL for their main site using their main servers - requests going direct to the site, with static/media files being served from a shared SSL certificate with their CDN.
All major browsers allow you to profile each load time of every single resource. Perfect for trying to compare relative latency at a particular location for a particular CDN. Chrome'a is especially good for this sort of thing, look at "network" in the developer tools.
Especially a doctor on whom many lives are depending, because so many of those lives are being lost to fatigue-induced mistakes. I know someone who almost died that way; she had a healthy distrust of hospitals, watched carefully what was going on, and noticed just in time when an exhausted doctor was about to give her the wrong injection which would probably have killed her. The doctor just mumbled "oh, sorry," and shambled on her way, perhaps to kill some other patient at a later date.
Until you realize that the public doesn't have as much money as the lobbyists.
Row-level locks are really sweet in case you have to handle multiple row/tables update/insert in the same transaction, in order to keep the db consistent even under sustained concurrency.
But, dead locks really strike you if you don't use them carefully.
I wonder if dead locks are easyer to prevent in Postgres
One more nice post about this topic: http://www.elekslabs.com/2013/11/aws-10-things-youre-probabl...
I am not sure what the added benefit is (apart from the looks of using your own domain) when using your own custom SSL? Isn't the standard https connection through Cloudfronts wildcard SSL https://somethingsomething.cloudfront.net enough to be on the safe side? Really curious.
Here's how I do type checking in Javascript.

function doStuffWithAVarietyOfParameters(s, a, b, i, ni, p)
{
var f = 'contractCategoriesAndAddExpandButtons()';
UTILS.checkArgs(f, arguments, ['string', 'array', 'boolean', 'int', 'negativeInt', 'Particle']);

// Do stuff.
}

For functions with many parameters, I like to pass the parameters inside an object and give the keys descriptive names.

function doStuffWithAVarietyOfParameters(o)
{
var f = 'contractCategoriesAndAddExpandButtons()';
UTILS.validator.checkObject
(
o,
{
arrayParam : 'array' ,
boolParam : 'boolean' ,
nullOrFloatParam: 'nullOrFloat',
particleParam : 'Particle' ,
positiveIntParam: 'positiveInt',
stringParam : 'string'
}
);

// Do stuff.
}

Both functions will throw an exception if the arguments list is not as expected. The code can be found via the links below.

https://github.com/tomcdonnell/lib_tom/blob/master/js/utils/...

https://github.com/tomcdonnell/lib_tom/blob/master/js/utils/...

I do type checking similarly in PHP.

http://tomcdonnell-tech.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/favourite-ph...
i don't think you can say the test if time when it had only been a few years.
Virus-writing magazine valhalla#4 released
Virus-writing magazine valhalla#4 has been released.

Content:
) DNA infection with computer code
) cross-infectors for Win32/Linux/OSX (using code abstraction) and JS/VBS/Ruby/MatLab/Python (using MetaLanguages)
) 32 (!) new infectors for different platforms
) Anti-Sandbox and Anti-Emulation techniques
) Linux 64bit infection
) Metamorphism
) new file infectors using Java and GPU PTX code
) GPG encrypted worm using online key-servers
*) interviews

(download: http://hh86.virii.lu/Valhalla_4.rar - online: http://spth.virii.lu/v4/)
How to get your Twitter followers in Excel for free
this post shows how to get Twitter followers/followings of any account in Excel for free (without using Twitter API).
We switched from Cloudfront to Fastly and couldn't be happier. These guys are awesome and the product is top notch. I highly recommend Fastly.

We weren't too impressed with Cloudfront. The performance was all over the place and they provide no insight for cache hits/misses.
The approach is interesting but the syntax makes it hard to use. Why not make the first arguments the types like one would expect?