skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Finalization is not needed but it is nice to have. For example releasing shared IPC resources.

> Finalization functionality isn't something that sane programs depend on

One definitely wouldn't want to use it _if they don't have to_, but sometimes there is no choice. Finalization is one of those things one does reluctantly because they end up having to use shared memory for example. Or standard library want to help you not leak file descriptors.

> Garbage collection of memory makes sense because if you run out of memory or allocate and remove pointers a lot of stuff, the garbage collector can naturally kick in and find you some more memory to use.

Well collection of anything unused and limited probably makes sense because otherwise you'd run out of them eventually. Garbage collection doesn't magically add RAM sticks to the machine though. If you've used all the memory and still hold references to all the objects, (in a GCed language), there is nothing GC can do. [Well I guess you can have weak refs like in Python...].

> If you allocate a bunch of file handles, does the garbage collector kick in when your OS tells you that you've run out of file descriptors?

Well in a high level language that has GC you'd expect to also probably deal with File _objects_ not file _descriptors_. In that case I would expect those _File_ objects when and if they are GC-ed to also close their file descriptor appropriately. That is where being able to have finalizers helps. Because a finalizer of a File object would close the file descriptor.
On the flip side, it also exposes how shitty assholes a lot of cyclists are. I've been involved in enough group bike rides to know that most of the time, the cyclist started it. Asshole cyclists are probably also asshole drivers and asshole pedestrians.
Actually, that is one of primary issues plaguing healthcare.gov. The government intentionally changed the requirements to prevent you from browsing the prices of plans. This caused huge amounts of unnecessary traffic on the identity verification process while people were unable to perform even the first step of shopping.

The current system actually contains this information, and probably had a nice view of it, but the misguided people in charge don't want us to see it, despite it all being nicely available in JSON at data.healthcare.gov.
i think that's right, but maybe more "agile" in that there is no explicit contract being fulfilled, just what the developer ensuring valid input and output to the functions they implement.
Does't work in IE11, the water overflow the text.
I think you're right about it being semantics. In fact I think that would explain a lot of the reaction on all sides.

E.g. when we allow the FBI to wiretap people pursuant to a lawfully-issued warrant, that's in reality done with the understanding that the FBI had the technical capability to execute that wiretap, warrant or not. The warrant isn't technically required anymore, it's only a procedural safeguard. But most people do not necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about how the FBI could be listening to all of their phone calls, since they know that they are not actually being targeted in practice.

So it is on what is truly a global Internet. The IP packets don't go flying around with "I'm an American" bits set, so in the end the only real safeguard if you're going to try to mine data of national interest from the Internet is procedural. At best technical safeguards could be used within the NSA's various data warehouses after collection has occurred, but there's no way to get around the fact that American and non-American data is intermingled everywhere on the Internet.

Is this a satisfactory state of affairs? Nope! If you're a privacy advocate you might say that the response is to simply stop collecting intelligence at all and accept all the consequences that follow from that. If you're kind of in the middle you might want to add more oversight, transparency and other safeguards to retain the ability to gain intelligence (not just for counter-terrorism, but for everything the nation needs it for), while not risking mass abuse of civil liberties by differenting definitions of "targeting".

But the sea change was not the NSA deciding to spy on Americans, it was Americans deciding to join the rest of the world on a global network, a problem the NSA didn't previously have to really sort through. I won't say I agree with all the inventive ways they've found to try to collect intelligence, but nor do I think that there is some directed effort by NSA to violate American civil liberties as a goal in and of itself.

You're right that "terrorism!" has been their go-to reasoning in the public eye, but to be fair that is one of the big things the people are large are concerned with and, to parrot the top comment on this thread, the full truth about diplomatic cloak-and-dagger games is rather nuanced.
A lot of mathematics intersects with programming. There is a clear notion of isomorphism in programming and computer science. The pedestrian web dev is not aware of it.

Imagine a graph theory researcher calling a program which handles graphs a web app. Isn't that confusing?
BTC China overtakes MtGox USD in 30 day volume
someone misused mongodb, and now they're blaming mongodb for it.

A social network will have a lot of relations -- so you should use a relational database.

Other web apps may not need as many relations (most mobile apps), in which mongodb is a superior solution
yes, but if someone asks me in an interview if we do unit testing, the answer is really a no...

so maybe the takeaway is if people don't do what you expect, maybe digging a little deeper before running away screaming ;)
C doesn't control memory. brk() does. There are various malloc libraries out there to improve the way malloc manages memory.

But ideally you don't want to allocate memory at all. You want to have memory preallocated and preferably accessing a page that's still in cache. You can control memory pages in C because it doesn't manage that for you.
Super interesting project lost in the new page 2 :(.
Butterflylabs is notorious for delivering many months late.
Reminds me of the NYT "Stuffy" app, which was built in a similar way: http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/building-a-better-s...
Can anyone comment on the relative efficiency of charitable donations to disaster relief, as opposed to other programs?

I think it would be a mistake to bias charitable donations towards acute problems as opposed to chronic ones.

But on the other hand, increases in the total amount of charitable giving are a net plus, so I'm not complaining about this story, I just think it's good to think of the bigger picture too.
> The central repository is the only point that knows (with 100% certainty) which ref the branch was set to before the force push.

git reports it to you when you do the force push:

% git push github master --force
…
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/foo/repo.git
+ 4d44b63...ad5b147 master -> master (forced update)
^ ^
previous what you've forced it to

Of course, if you lose the output, then yes, the reflog is the only thing that has it. But force pushing is so rare, and something that (should) is done with care, I'm puzzled as to how someone "accidentally" >150 repos.
I have created a very simple course review system for my university students
I want a service that boosts my App Store Rankings. Can you build that?
Now isn't the time to help. Enough governments already have relief supplies available for natural disasters so they're already helping. If you really want to help then work on protection against future disasters. People only feel like they care now because it's in the news. The ongoing vulnerability of the Phillipines to natural disasters isn't in the news and people won't care enough to help them prepare before it happens again. A sea wall last week would have been worth a lot more than food today but it's not newsworthy so people didn't contribute.
I took it last semester. Most definitely a trap - Smola is one of those guys who's just too smart to teach. Great material - terrible instruction.
What, a new framework in a new language? I haven't even learned ruby on rails yet.
Plenty they can do. Here's an example: "Give this guy an exit visa, or the next time your Snowden equivalent flees to France, we're going to make sure that his name is spelled wrong on the paperwork, if you know what we mean."
Well, it's that. Instead of posting a status, you post a picture.

So for instance, I have a friend who posted a picture of her new apartment. That spurred a discussion about it. Pretty simple :)

It's actually more convenient than facebook, at least I found it so. And I don't have to read anyone's stupid post about "I wish it'd stop" or "Never again" or "You're a bitch blah blah blah blah blah. You know who you are" -.-
$4.1m goes missing as Chinese bitcoin trading platform GBL vanishes
what's wrong with "immutable" ?
The WSJ comment community is a) right wing and b) terminally stupid. I am not trying to suggest that the two are equivalent, but whenever there's a story like this 80% of the comments consist of dismissing global warming as a hoax.
Here I am looking for sine waves in the code. I need to think simpler.
The reason to mine Litecoin in this context is because the algorithm (scrypt) hasn't been taken over by ASICs yet. So CPUs have a smaller disadvantage.
I lived in the suburbs about 30 mins from ATL, never worked there but enjoyed it :)
A couple weeks ago after we noticed an email/password check bot running against our service. It was going through the list of emails from the Adobe (we didn't decrypt passwords though, just emails match). The bot itself was blocked by our system but we emailed our users that had their email/password tested. The funny part is that the bot had a bug: it followed the returned 302 redirect. Since it was coming from China's IPs, we started to reply with redirects to www.gov.cn and the bot stopped in about an hour after that. Obviously, someone got a visit from China's KGB :) :) :)
Sorry to be a downer, but there's a typo on your front page which immediately turned me off:

"Let's face it ADD COMMA HERE conducting a bitcoin transaction on the internet can be risky, and having to trust a total stranger can be scary."

Awkward wording on the rest of the page, along with more grammar problems in your FAQ, suggest that you should ask an English major to proofread your pages. :-)
Toolkit For Seeding An Ember Project Using Karma, RequireJs, Qunit, and TDD
Scary book trailer
I mean, houston is the same way. I used to live 30-45 mins away and I got a $1200 3br nice house in a nice neighborhood.

I live in Midtown now and a 1br is $1400+. But off at the medical center you can find places that are around $900 for 1br, and sometimes less. And that's 15 minutes (or less) from downtown.
Agreed - if you're new to programming in Go, I'd recommend using the standard library (supplemented by Gorilla[0] once you get the hang of things).

If things start getting unwieldy as your app grows, you can always try out something like Revel, but by starting with the standard library (which already has a very clean web server built-in), you'll get a sense for the way things work "under the hood" early-on.

If you want to see how a Go web server built with just the standard lib + Gorilla looks, I wrote a simple sample application a while back: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/go-server-bootstrap . The most verbose part is the oauth2 callback.

I should get around to updating it (it still even uses a Makefile! Eek!), but it gives the basic idea.

(Sidenote: When did Github stop supporting the ".markdown" extension instead of just ".md"?)

[0] http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/
"The bottom line is: if your doctor isn't giving you an electronic copy of your record — and in 2014, in the format of your choice — they're breaking the law."
This is demonstrably false. Meaningful use is not at this time a mandate. It is an incentive program. The incentive will likely turn from a carrot to a stick in the future, but as of 2014 there is no mandate on US physicians to comply with meaningful use stage anything.
http://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EHRI...
Revamp the instant Messenger
Light Table 0.5.19 released (includes plugin support)
I prefer this one:

* https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader

* https://secure.gog.com/forum/general/lgogdownloader_gogdownl...
The point is that the valley isn't an innocent victim here they have in the past and still do facilitate the surveillance state. To act as if refusing to deal with anyone involved would only mean uninviting some government employees from a few conferences and black balling a collection of beltway bandits is naive. The uncomfortable truth is that you would probably have to stop dealing with a lot more people and companies than you would be comfortable with.
Right. Some things would be explained from the basics, and some topics would be covered by referring you to obscure papers on advanced techniques in machine learning published by the professors.
Anecdotally I have heard that NSA wages are pretty good. They're competing for talent with finance after all. But compensation aside, by far the awesomest perk that comes with working for the NSA (I'm told) is that under no circumstances whatsoever are you allowed to take your work home with you (or even out of the building). I can't think of very many other researchy STEM jobs where you could make that claim. Even tenured professors at the best schools seem to work 24/7.
Spam in Q3 2013
As a pedestrian in Manhattan it's really hard for me to model in my head what a person on a bicycle going to do. What is the protocol for cyclists and red lights - are they supposed to stop like other vehicles? Do people crossing the street with a walk sign have right of way? Can they take free left turns if no cars are at the intersection?
Hello! no I don't host the content myself the application acts as a search engine / index for content that a spider aggregates from the internet. However having seen a lot of the feedback thus far I'm going to make an update to the application that adds more transparency about where the video is being sourced from and downloaded from. it basically connects to streams from about 8 different websites where the users who upload the content have agreed to have the rights to do so and extracts the video links then downloads and manages the folders.
True, but lyrics are only a portion of a musical work, and in general they're a pretty small amount of text (compared to, say, the median news article). I think RG would respond by pointing out that the volume of commentary frequently dwarfs source material.
"This is stupid. You severe ties with the NSA but what about the FBI, CIA, DEA, DISA, DIA, the list goes on."

Well, I wouldn't call it stupid. Perhaps I would call it "incomplete". Or "hey, that's a start!".
Scripthica: A web environment for creating and sharing algorithmic music.
Thanks for the quote, it's quite illuminating.

This is actually essentially what I was arguing, not just moe's point:

But all
that demonstrates is that the NSA has an
interest in being able to (legally) monitor
encrypted communications. Which everyone already
knows.

I don't condone designing backdoors into products. Maybe I can research into BULLRUN more but the impression I had was that the intention was to subvert crypto in a way that only NSA could use (either via escrow or constants-up-their-sleeve), perhaps to take advantage of exploits that happened to get shipped to the commercial sector, but not to design broken gear that anyone could subvert if they know the secret handshake. Obviously even this is sneaky and shady as can be, but that goes with the territory (though @kgo would seem to agree that it's nefarious :-D).

But even assuming malice here, I'd have said even at the time, with the ongoing changes to communication patterns across the world, that there's simply no way you can assume NSA isn't trying to hack everything they can. When I was reading Schneier a decade or more ago they were the very definition of Mallory, and nothing has changed on that since. But I suppose you're right, that people at the time weren't seeing NSA the same way I was.
Technically that is an asteroid with a comet-like tail. The main difference is where it comes from and the type of material it's made out of.
We don't host any of the content its aggregated from public ally available websites the application is simply a search engine with links to where the content was found.
Users who upload videos to these websites agree to have the rights to do so.
Facebook is the company that surprised me here.

Stackrank seems like umpteen other methods whose ultimate aim is to vacuuming people dry and discarding them. This "works" in the sense that if you can't motivate someone with the challenge, excitement and etc of working for you, there's always money, fear and the-other-etceteras.

Yahoo and Microsoft have lost all cachet to their workplace, and Amazon has always been innovative in the "our engineers have calculated exactly the profit made from turning off the air-conditioning in warehousing and legal has drafted the matching don't-ask, don't-tell contract" sense.

But Facebook using this seems like an indication they've reconciled themselves to being on the way down. That was quick.
Simple chart shows why you should have at least some Bitcoin
Android Apps for PC
I'm taking this class right now and it is certainly an interesting twist on the topic - its fun to see how many different ML techniques solve variants of a single base problem that you can analyze with statistical learning theory. Also: how many different regularizations are equivalent, and how some "intuitive", ad-hoc-seem-to-work regularizations you might think up in isolation actually can be theoretically justified. It contrasts with the more traditional, also grad-level 6.867 ML class.
Hey Bro, you're being insensitive
Mars Orbiter Spacecraft's apogee raised to 1,18,642km
All the ASIC miners are notorious for delivering many months late.
Is it a bug that can be raised against Firefox/Gecko?
Luca details the three things that led to this mass force push in his message here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/jenkinsci-dev/-myjRIPcVwU/v8...
I know that this is an emergency and perhaps not the best time to split hairs.

Having said that, is there a Charity Navigator for the UK / Europe?

http://www.charitynavigator.org/

I do not give a single red penny to even a local food bank unless I am fairly familiar with the inner workings and general overhead of the organization.

I am sorry but gone are those days one could blindly write a check to any random outfit - Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders or Oxfam - however reputable and however straight-laced.

The kind of waste, misuse and sheer incompetence that goes on in some charity houses borders on the rotten.
Given the tools we have to detect the sun's 'doings' today are magnanimously more sophisticated than 200 years ago, could it be that 200 years ago several fluctuations were missed because the overall balance still remained throughout the cycles?
I always run Ganglia on my servers. You can see memory used, memory shared, memory cached, memory buffered, and memory swapped all over time as well as total in-core memory. This has saved me (and my team) from ever having to misinterpret command line output. Takeaway, Linux is smart about using memory, probably smarter than you. http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/
Could Bitcoin Be More Disruptive than the Internet?
This quote really got me choked up, "I am a decent person. But if you have not eaten in 3 days, you do shameful things to survive," ...as for Rappler's mood meter, I'm definitely SAD and angry about all this.
I'd rather not have the people I deal with on a professional basis see pictures of me at a party drinking alcohol.

I don't care if it's perfectly legitimate and understandable behaviour, it's awkward.
How does an issue with the GUI indicate hubris?
I visited Mt Wilson on the weekend and took the tour there. One part of the tour took us inside the 150ft solar tower operated by UCLA. I was surprised to see that they recorded sunspot activity by sketching diagrams by hand.

And they put them on the web. If you want to see "puzzling" lack of sunspot activity, here it is:

http://obs.astro.ucla.edu/cur_drw.html
Have you looked at nand2tetris? http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Going even farther back up the chain there's stuff like this:
http://www.jpmsupply.com/servlet/the-1082/AM,-Radio,-Solder/...
The author details how he did it here:

http://thehackerblog.com/how-i-got-5000-github-followers-in-...
Some of them do. I took one at Georgia Tech. I can't remember the course name, but it's listed as a CS class. It's taught by Merrick Furst.

The coursework involves basically going through the business model canvas, how to rapidly prototype, how to collect good feedback and other startup related topics. Somewhat more oriented towards "startups" versus "entrepreneurship", because that's Merrick's focus (see Flashpoint@Georgia Tech)
▯♥△ - A platformer with genetic level design
Hahaha join the club, I neither know Ruby nor Rails. Don't know Go either, or Node, or Angular....I'm a dinosaur :)
Why you should use a Wiki
DVD to zune - Convert/ Rip/ Transfer DVD movies to zune with DVDFab DVD Ripper
DVDFab is the all-in-one software package for copying Blu-ray/DVD and converting video files.

Also it's a fantastic file converter & transfer which can rip and convert DVD/Blu-ray movies or transfer your local files to various portable devices like iPod,iPhone,PSP,cell phone,ZUNE,etc.
This is a tutorial for "DVD Ripper - zune" of DVDFab . Convert DVD title to WMV files, which can be played on Microsoft ZUNE.
(Sample) Alogirthm Implementations
They've definitely added some lyrics to the internet that weren't previously there. Unfortunately, the rise of these aggregated ad-trap lyrics sites has also had the side-effect of crowding out better, more decentralized lyrics. Google seems to prefer these big centralized sites over the long-tail fan sites that provide higher-quality, curated and proofread lyrics.

When I search for, say, [joy division atrocity exhibition lyrics], I get 10 generic lyrics sites as my first page of Google results. But what I really want is to get a result more like this: http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/atrocity.html

Besides not being piled up with ads, those fan-curated sites typically have fewer spelling errors, actually attribute lyrics to specific versions of a song and note variations, etc. Of course, in the cases where I already know a good fan site, I can either go directly, or do a site: search in Google. But in other cases I have to click through pages of this junk.
Amusingly enough, this isn't even an uncommon occurrence in the Bitcoin world. Either compromises or shady actors seem to take down a large portion of their services, usually taking large sums of money with them.

It does look like a similar case to inputs.io and a few other sites too, people "invest" or store large amounts of money with a person despite the community making every attempt to warn people that it is a terrible, awful, terrible idea to do so.
Consider the possibility of blackballing anybody who continues to be involved.

Would that mean blackballing people who continue to work for government contractors as well? Possibly. I'd say that is left up to the individual implementor. We don't need to all literally agree on a list of individuals to blackball. A general trend across some subset of the community would do just fine. Some people may take it to the extreme, some may only dissociate from a narrowly defined group of people. This sort of social tension, or pressure, doesn't need to be engineered with exacting precision. A respected professor here, an influential ex-boss there, one of your college buddies that you might consider asking for a recommendation one day... all can contribute to this ostracism in their own way.