skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not if their corporate deals were different in a way that made bulk testing at the factory more expensive than paying Best Buy to do it for the consumer market...
Agreed, a compiler should replace "assert(FOO)" with "FOO", and then remove "FOO" if it has no side effects, like any statement.
For http connections that's true. Websockets have a separate pool though, and a much higher cap (200 in Firefox). Nginx recently added websocket support.
Anybody aware of a similar game to ~teach~ python? I remember seeing a thread that used a war game to teach java, was hoping there's one for python too
cheers
34, and the oldest code of mine online is 11 years old:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/count/

"The count program is a very simple utility that recursively counts the size of directories, optionally producing a per-directory breakdown of usage."

Ah, nostalgia. There are closed Solaris SPARC specific bugs in the issue tracker :)
You're not wrong, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't make a point.

> but merely an email trail will suffice to make your point and get the other party (if honorable) to pay.

This is true if and when you are expressive in your emails. As soon as a new feature is added to the scope, it is imperative that you speak out and say "Well, this is out of scope, but we can likely accommodate by adjusting the scope <however>".

Far too often I see freelancers just take on the work without mentioning it's a scope change, only to have to fight for the bill to be paid later.

In fact, most of the people I see complaining about customers not paying are due to a failure of setting appropriate expectations. If timelines are changing as a result of your efforts, notify the customer. If they're changing as a result of the customer's actions, notify the customer. If the scope is changing for any reason, notify the customer.

Do not expect to be able to submit a bill at the end of the day and have it be paid -- in companies of a sufficient size, the person paying the bills is not the same person you're dealing with on scope, and the person paying the bills is likely being paid, in part, to ensure that they aren't being over billed. Where that's the case, they'll examine the contract line by line and compare it to the invoice, and pity to whomever meets someone good at that job.

They're not trying to screw you over, they're just trying to make sure taht they're not getting ripped off, and changing how you bill the customer without notifying the customer of a change, looks very much like ripping them off (even if it isn't.)

Use contracts. Use email. Speak plainly.
That's the part that struck me, reminiscent of Henry Ford's possibly misattributed quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” How quaint it now seems, the thought of carrying a device that's not an always-networked computer, with the incidental ability to place voice calls.

In 20 years, it's likely the device will be implanted, perched on our shoulder or hovering around our head, and the thought of having to physically remove our communication tool from our pocket to use it will seem impossibly outdated.
29. The oldest code I had public isn't actually online anymore as of last year.

I wrote a bunch of global scripts while a member of a social MUD called The Chatting Zone between 1997 and about 2002.

I just looked and apparently the server was taken down last year or so. This makes me a little bit sad.

Other than that there seems to a be a few websites I developed or contributed to around 10 years ago that haven't been changed.
This is lovely. It seems to bug out in Firefox 25 when I switch away from the tab it's on - any debugging info that would be useful?
Would you be interested in sharing how you are helping with the latter (technical/security)?
Credit cards companies charge around 3% per transaction, and charges are susceptible to chargebacks. ACH transfers take around a week. Wire transfers cost $40. Bitcoin transactions costs a few cents each and are done in less than an hour.
highlighting creates a picture of your code that the human brain can process much quicker, thats why traffic lights or player jerseys have color.
> Things like traversing a tree to find the shortest path.

No one is going to address the fact that there is only ONE possible path to a node in a tree? This guy seems to have no idea what he's talking about, no wonder he dislikes algorithmic questions. Instant no-hire.
There are numerous moral reasons why such information should be protected. Firstly, the whole idea of completing a sentence is that he or she has paid their debt to society. If they are released and are looking for a job, they should be able to get that job on their own merits. We as a society should not allow discrimination based on crimes that in principle are already paid for. A job is a necessary part of being a member of society, we should not allow employers to filter candidates for arbitrary reasons, whatever they may be.

From the perspective of society, it is against societies interest to hinder a convicted person from obtaining meaningful employment. Having legitimate access to income is one of the mains ways that a person can become and stay a productive member of society rather than a drain as a criminal. Society should do everything in its power to encourage this. Eliminating this barrier to reintegration is an obvious choice.

Lastly, the assumption that the process is fair and impartial has been shown repeatedly to be false. At least one can argue that an unfair or disproportionate conviction is not permanent, but it becomes that when people are subsequently barred from full reintegration in society through extra-judicial processes.
Contracts are such a basic fact of business life, universally understood by good-faith vendors and customers, that recalcitrance about signing one should be taken as a "run don't walk" signal. By working without a contract, you doubly imperil yourself: you lose significant legal protections, and also select a client base that is particularly likely to cause you problems down the road.

Matasano has many clients we've maintained since the formation of the company in 2005, and many more where our counterparts in those companies are friends. The idea of doing business with any of them sans contract is unthinkable. It just doesn't happen.

Working without a contract is unprofessional. Don't do it.
I partially agree but wonder how much the 'average person' truly understands how traditional fiat currency works. They use it because they know people accept it but probably don't fundamentally understand how the fed reserve/inflation/etc works.
For most of 'money' users 'scaling the network' would mean liquidity and convertibility - it should be transparent, easy, safe and fast to interchange bitcoin with all other currencies. This implicitly requires cooperation with the nation states, not expecting no interference whatsoever.

For the billions people in the world who use money, "can't be interfered with" is not even near the top of properties money must have. Above all, it should be liquid (i.e., accepted in most places w/o hassle) and at least somewhat stable in value. Heck, for most uses the old Zimbabwean dollar was a better currency than Bitcoin - sure, it was under full state control and falling in value like a lead weight, but millions of people could and did successfully use it for their daily money needs.
Ask HN: What are the chances the NSA backdoored the Java/jvm platform?
The Java/jvm platform being widely deployed all over the world, from company servers to personal computers, and with recent revelations about the NSA approaching Linus to backdoor the linux kernel, I kept thinking the jvm is a natural target for the NSA.

What are the chances of this "backdooring operation" being successful?
> I still remember the first iPads in 2007. I was totally one of the nay-sayers. "Who'd want this giant iPhone? This is silly, nobody wants a mini-flat-screen as a computer"

It's hard to believe but the iPad is just over 3 years old, released in 2010. 2007 was the iPhone launch.
I guess I'm wrong, but for me the purpose of a game is to be fun to play. This one isn't.
I'm 21, the oldest code I can find is from when I was 17, written in AutoIt... some shitty Windows automation language with BASIC-like syntax.

http://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/104814-arrays-in-aut...

If I remember correctly, this is an auto-adding bot for MySpace, back when I ran a website for people to add each other and boost their friend count. Thinking back, I just built a digital orgy for MySpace whores. Cool.
Show HN: iPhone Sports Trivia Game We Built for a Hackathon
I think that in the context of the US, this would correspond to removing certain crimes from a person's record after a given amount of time.

This seems reasonable to me too, since it allows a uniform way to control the public information on a person's background. A conviction, even a violent one, that happened 30 years ago, is not necessarily something that should be part of the public record.
I really like this whole concept of using small projects like this and the spreadsheet thing to create simple, yet elegant apps.

I wonder if this could be a good method for teaching technologies like CSS, JS, and HTML? If you think about it, there isn't a lot of code here, so it would be easy for a student to go through it line by line and end up learning a lot.
That said lighten the charge up a bit if asked say something like, yeah I got caught with a joint in college, don't say I have a felony conviction. Talk to your lawyer and he will probably come up with an even better sounding explanation.

The fact that he got a felony conviction for a first offense suggests that it was more than just a joint (he says that the quantity in his possession would mean an 8 year minimum sentence). Looking at the federal sentencing guidelines (http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2012_Guidelines/Manual_HTML/2...) and sentencing chart (http://www.ussc.gov/Guidelines/2011_Guidelines/Manual_PDF/Se...), it seems like he would have to have quite a large quantity of marijuana to get that much time for a first offense (e.g. 1 KG of marijuana on a first offense would only give you 6 months minimum).
Bitcoin will only be unstable as long as there is disagreement about the economics of it. Once we get reasonably close to consensus about that, price will stabilize to where the consensus model says it should be.

I suspect that won't happen until some time after the current crop of incoming economics PhDs are tenured.
I'm 21 and my oldest code is seven years old. It's stuff I wrote for an MMORPG I used to play.
The Notebook For The People Who Want To Change The World
That's what they call "predicting the average". When a company that makes an entrenched product category (MP3 players) is under attack from competitors with a product that is displacing theirs (smartphones), and they respond by entering into the other product category, late, with only half the functionality of their competitors and ignoring much of the conventional wisdom, the typical case is that they will fail. That the iphone succeeded is a statistical anomaly. Basically they used fortune teller's tricks to predict technology.

Now, the interesting thing here for me is not how embarassingly wrong they were, it's how we misattribute being right to any kind of prescience or competence. The people who said the iphone was going to be a hit were making stuff up just as much as the people who said it would flop, but they were accidentally right. In reality nobody could possibly predict what the iphone was going to do in the market.
"I asked my boss if he even called my references in my resume. He said nope."

I've been thru the training on the other side. Massive legal liability if I say anything to someone on the phone other than dates of employment. Company policy problems if I say anything other than talk to HR because of the legal liability problems listed above. So why even bother calling? In some states its safe to say if they're eligible for rehire but not in other states so big multistate employers just say never say anything to anyone ever. So whats the upside of saying anything? Well, nothing. And whats the downside? OMG legal attack dogs all over. So don't be an idiot, say nothing. And somehow this above paragraph is a one hour formal HR class.

When you're a kid you usually have no one worthwhile to list as a reference (maybe your landlord, some prof who can't remember you anyway, maybe your priest or equivalent, I've seen it all). And when you're more experienced and know people, your "references" are not a resume section but being able to rattle off the names of 4 of the 6 ex-coworkers who currently work at the new place. So I usually don't put down references or just pick random coworkers (after telling them first) and they never report back being called.

A reference section on a resume is an anachronism, like the old policy of attaching a photograph to your resume to prove you're the right race, stuff like that.
> When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours

Books don't have syntax highlighting, but having never read a book that does, I can't say one way or the other that it is a terrible idea.

And actually, as I think about it more, books would be a nicer reading experience if conversations were highlighted, and if key person/place names where in a different color.

(Just like text in RPGs sometimes).
I moved off Abrahamsen's recipe 18 months ago or so for no good reason other than I like to make work for myself: it had been working just fine for me. You set it up on a cloud server, take an image, and that's that - you have a working base from which you can restore your mail server if anything bad should happen.

Last year I put up the Dovecot / Postfix / Postfix Admin / Horde recipe I used in place of Abrahamsen's, and judging by the feedback it's helped a great many people:

https://www.exratione.com/2012/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-120...

(You can replace Horde with Roundcube or any other webmail package you care to put in place if you don't like it).

The market here is for learning, not necessarily for setting up. If you don't know how to set up a mail server, it is well worth walking through one of these as it will teach the lay of the land. Then you can later move to a packaged solution, as you'll be knowledgeable enough to troubleshoot it when it breaks.

I was intending to put together a Chef cookbook for my recipe, but looking at what's already out there it seems like it would duplicate some good ones that already exist. e.g.:

https://github.com/onddo/postfix-dovecot-cookbook

I think that running your own mail server is certainly worth the initial effort; once you have the thing set up it ticks along with very little upkeep needed.
Can you give an example of the Python you're writing that requires assertions to be functional? My guess is that you're using assertions where raising and catching exceptions would be more appropriate.
The reason digg died and we've thrived is because a month in, we realized being a platform for people to create their own subreddits (and thus many community forums) was the only way we'd scale. At some point if there were only one front page, we'd hit a ceiling, whereas as a platform, we can scale forever.
Do you think it can be? Wallets on mobile devices an POS technology can make this happen
If this comes to fruition I just hope they get the controller right: it's of tantamount importance. Gesture based recognition for games is not something that makes up for a relaxing experience.
I don't agree.

Do you understand how the credit card system works? Maybe you do, but billions of people do not, yet use it ubiquitously.
Apple releases iPod (2001)
Credit cards pay me back around 1% per transaction, and if someone cheats me, I can chargeback. Isn't it far better than Bitcoin? :)

Btw, why isn't ACH/wire transfers a solution? If done properly (unlike USA), they cost a few cents and can be transmitted in less than an hour (not 24/7 yet, though).
> Ah, nostalgia. There are closed Solaris SPARC specific bugs in the issue tracker :)

Nostalgia indeed, that's like a whole other era by now. There's a lot of technology like that that's just on the edge of my memory -- like the Token Ring networks I would see even into the mid/late-90s.
Thanks for the heads up. I've added a redirect to the proper page!
False.
I left in 2010 - this was the last thing I did: http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/apnsu/helping_haiti_be...
I left to go volunteer for Kiva in Armenia and stayed on as an advisor and eventually board member.
GHB is actually used as a drug to treat narcolepsy as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_oxybate
Computational Sprinting
From 1999, I was 12 :)
http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?tx...
Brad DeLong had an interesting post [0] on that question Friday. Basically, the strong market reaction to the talk this spring of tapering convinced him that yes there is a strong effect on long term interest rates which then stimulates investment.

[0] http://equitablegrowth.org/2013/11/15/743/what-is-quantitati...
For window resizing, i'd actually use debounce. Most times, a user resizes a window with a predetermined size in mind -- they want to show something behind the window, or want to make the window fill an existing space.

In that case, showing live updates in the window during resizing might not be worth it.
Why you gotta bring another Armenian into this?
Impressive after all these years still racking up downloads:)
30, and BackPAN has some stuff from Feb 2000 when I was 16(!)
Usability. Primarily of payments.

For something like PayPal, I can send money to an email address.
For M-Pesa countries, I can send money to a phone number.
If I'm in the UK, I can send money to a sort code (12-34-56) and account number (98765432).
For international payments, I can send money to an IBAN (GB29 NWBK 6016 1331 9268 19)

For BitCoin? I have to send payment to "FHTbTN7omGUchDpmuHumii"

I can't read that out over the phone or easily copy type it - I certainly can't remember it. There are no checksums, and no routing information.

So, for me, there's a high barrier to entry for doing something as simple as paying someone back for a meal.
'twas straight nerve-wracking!
I'd love to switch to Julia, but I rely on a lot of packages that are only available in R (e.g. lots from http://bioconductor.org/). Is there any way to call R code from Julia?
I mean that I believe in the fundamental need of BTC, the potential for significant adoption and the reality that it can be simplified for all consumers. I think BTC will win out versus other crypto-currencies because its adoption thus far, which makes it hard for a secondary one to scale beyond BTC. I own and wish I doubled down earlier...
Yeah. I even had an exchange on twitter w Radnor and he confirmed it.
Syntax highlighting is our engineered Synesthesia.

> "The best way I can describe it is to compare it to reading a book. When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours. What I want to do is to read the book, to take in the information."

I would love to try reading a book with the same support. Nouns in red and adverbs in green. It would be fantastic! So much passive information available… Now I think I know what my next weekend project is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
There are two different functional components of a contract; the "terms" and the "statement of work" (SOW). They're often combined in a single "standard contractor agreement" with a fill-in-the-blanks "SOW exhibit", but just as often you have a distinct master agreement with terms and a SOW for each project.

The SOW is responsible for laying out what work you're going to do. If a changing spec is a project risk, a typical consultant response to that would be to build some of the spec language into the SOW, so that if the spec changes in a way that materially harms your ability to complete the project, you have recourse with the client.

The typical best case scenario for spec slips on projects is a client that extends the contract to account for them, and a somewhat rigorous SOW is a good tool for making that happen.
If you don't find a use for it, see if your local primary or secondary school has a computing course - they may be able to make use of it!
You should've seen what we did off-camera with those upvotes and John Lithgow.
No idea what pypy does but cpython with the -O flag will.

assert.py:
a = 0
def gadd(b):
global a
a = a + b
return a
assert gadd(1) == 1, 'a != 1'
print a

$python assert.py
1
$python -O assert.py
0
Are you saying that no pre-teen girls have G+ accounts? Or that because COPPA gives Google some legislation to cover their asses if this kind of stalking were to happen, it's OK?
I remember reading this story on here before, and I'm glad to see everything worked out for you! Personally I think its terrible the treatment we give convicted felons, they're supposed to have paid their debt to society, right? So why are we denying them the very means to keep themselves on the right course and productive? It's absurd. Society should not be in the business of handing out life sentences outside of the judicial process.
Not quite 100000, but 1000 people are watching one guy play clash of clans right now on twitch:
http://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Clash%20of%20Clans
As a guest I can tell you it's a giant mindjob to be interviewed like that.
Here is a Snake implemented in React:

Demo: http://tomocchino.github.io/react-snake/

Source (150 lines): https://github.com/tomocchino/react-snake/blob/master/src/sn...
Show HN: Language agnostic katas on the command line
There are worse things that can happen to you when you work without a contract than simply not getting paid. Contracts also set up liability and contract termination terms, and without that stuff in writing, you can end up in a he-said she-said situation over these issues.

You should always work under a contract. I have a hard time seeing why anyone wouldn't.
You do realize that disclosing details of a proprietary project that I've worked on might be a no-no? A lot of us have signed a paper explicitly stating that we're not allowed to do this.
Do you think another cryptocurrency can come in and surpass BTC at this point? If so, how can the concept of cyrptocurrency be big if alternative options of the same core concept exist (relative to consumer adoption)?
This sounds nice in theory. In practice, the compiler cannot eliminate any log statements (writing to a log file is a side effect). Thus, the decision to not execute "FOO" as for example Java does when asserts are disabled, is the correct one.
People in developed countries with good credit scores and are not banned by chexsystems will get no value from bitcoin. For everyone else there's bitcoin(tm).

Being glib aside, there is a vast population of poorer people who either live in countries with unstable banking systems or are just not profitable for banking. These people will get the most value out of bitcoin.

It's like landline telephones. For people with established land line systems, the value of a cellphone isn't that much. For people who've never had a phone, and wont get land line service, a cell phone is amazing!

ACH/Wire transfers are very slow for Americans, and too much inertia makes it seem like they're not going away soon.
They're killing the PC, do you even care?
As a non-believer, what are your thoughts on its progress thus far?
If I have a choice of paying a provider with card or bitcoin, why would I choose bitcoin? I get more rights and benefits if I do the same thing with a card.

For the majority user, who is mostly buying and not selling, Bitcoin currently has an advantage only in cases where I can't/don't want to pay with a card - say, a need for anonymity, but that is only a small niche. How bitcoin can improve the experience for common transactions?