skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the general case, this is hard because you can easily disallow a lot of useful cases that don't cause problems.

For example, say you want to assert that a particular property of your object contains something:

assert obj.whatever != None

Whoops, unless your compiler is sophisticated enough to be able to follow the call chain and ensure that the getter doesn't cause any side effects, this is now no longer allowed. You'd have to use a temporary variable, which is unnatural and prevents the very optimization you're trying to pull off.
i don't see how you can avoid that long-term without a split/curved keyboard. maybe if you deliberately angle your hands, but then the keys are weird to hit
While the gesture is noble, you may end up hurting him/her in the long run. If media start linking to your domain rather than to the appstore page, he'll have broken links and lost pagerank if/when you decide to do something else with the domain.

Having said that, what a great domain!
Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move (2007)
Not sure what I'm doing wrong, but nearly every robot I write compiles, and then does nothing when run.

The only time I got it to do something else was by taking the sample code, raw copy-pasting it in, and running that.
Just to add another keyboard to the list, the KBT Pure is a Cherry MX version of the HHKB2 layout, and available for around $100. It's well built, compact and you can reach all keys without moving your hands too much. Good key feedback, and I can type "pianissimo" when I pay attention to the MX Brown's click feel.

I haven't gotten any faster, as 80% of my typing is still on a Thinkpad keyboard. Also the Cherry keys feel much too high and don't have a trackpoint.
And i thought DasKeyboards are expensive....
Spam can be hard to predict. I know people who have had a setup like that (working just fine as for you), and then all of a sudden they've been overwhelmed with hundreds to thousands of spam mails per day.
Because the drug doesn't exist?
Seems like quite a strong possibility, given his background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#Dismissal
You're repeating the justification for the status quo, but at some point these undeniable benefits of an integrated platform start to be dominated by growing complexities, weird interdependencies and conflicts of interest. I think we're over the tipping point now.
"Is there any consensus on the security of Bluetooth for keyboards?"

No consensus because security is really big.

So... is there a guard in the guard shack aka an active keyboard / mouse, yes/no just look at a spectrum analyzer for power spectrum in the ISM band BT uses. You can also jam the guards BT devices preventing him from doing anything quite easily. Although once you go active transmitting the game is kinda on.

Some talk about pattern recognition vs time but I've never heard anything "serious" about it. This is the old IBM selectric hack from decades ago where you'd take an audio recording of that classic typewriter and E latency is 7 ms, F is 8 ms, G is 9 ms due to inherent design of the printhead, so you play back the tape and output a near perfect stream of whatever was being typed. Supposedly you can do something like this with BT like the the human key latency between i and n is faster than q and z because no words have a qz. So even if the i and n and q and z are perfectly encrypted such that you'd never mathematically decode them individually, in a sequence representing english text its supposedly easy to decode. Supposedly. I don't think its a practical fear and probably doesn't work for rehearsed muscle memory type passphrases.

Generally you can MITM bluetooth but once you're paired you're OK. So attacker would have to be there when paired. Google for simple secure pairing SSP and I think that needs ver 2.1 or newer (no problemo). Basically if you're not typing in four 0 to pair, then its probably SSP?

Once a BT device is woken up latency isn't so bad but my SIL's mouse / keyboard were famous for about 1 second latency when they fell asleep until they woke up to save power. This would drive me bonkers, your experience may vary.

The tradeoff would be one less cable in exchange for a battery that only fails at the most inopportune time. Eh.
> I disagree. Poor spelling and grammar is an abomination in professional software if it is client facing.

It is abominable, but I have seen poor spelling and grammar on software released by Toshiba, I haven't heard any complaints about it.
I use the same lenovo keyboard, and in my text editor I map the mouse buttons to work like Canon Cat's LEAP keys. It's awesome. Any Canon Cat fans out there?
QQ: when you say you're a believer in the potential of Bitcoin, do you mean BC itself, crypto-currency, or decentralized and fee-less ways to pay for things and exchange funds? Is it the extra-governmental aspect of BC that you like or what being extra-governmental has allowed it to be?
David Nutt, the author, is the Real Deal though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt
"Assert is not a shortcut for
lazy coders."

Then they need to make something better for me. My c and python code isn't functional with asserts compiled out, because assert just makes my life easier.

In a perfect world, current assert semantics would be _DEBUG_ASSERT (all caps to let you know it has macro-ish behavior), and the normal assert would always be on.
In what respect, the identifiers or the keywords?
wow. I just signed on to a youtube account I had made years ago. I had not signed into it for a long time. Just this moment tried to sign on and things were okay, except I noticed I now have google plus for that account.

I just deleted everything. Seriously google, fuck you.
Out of curiosity: people who are running their own mail servers for multiple users, where do you host?
Practically everything I can think of needing on a daily basis has a solution already made and tested in jQuery. Very rarely do I have to reinvent the wheel, be it tablesorting, an AJAX-sourced type-ahead box, or a nicer date widget. That saves time and effort.

Its ubiquity also means that problems are often already solved in it. Every time I've run into a jQuery bug there has been discussion and work-arounds already posted online by people much smarter than myself.
Perhaps the developers communicated with their netops teams before designing the game protocols? Maybe they came to the conclusion that it's better to run TCP from a security/DDoS perspective than UDP? In other words, the ability to shut off inbound UDP outweighed any theoretical gains from using it in the game?

TCP SYN floods are handled with ease today. If you're actually using UDP in your product, you might as well paint "DDoS me" on your homepage.
I think there are 2 major categories of risk: one political/legal, the latter technical/security. I have no realistic way of helping with the former. I've started trying to help with the latter. We'll see.
Shadows: a software allegory
check out the kinesis advantage, and some other models they have too:
http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm

There's also another company that makes parallel keys, I think it's called Maltron.
I'm an admittedly harsh critic of G+ (though I very honestly wanted to like it).

Someone who's more inclined to be favorable is Robert Scoble. He worked under Vic Gundotra at Microsoft, and joined the service early. He's also had a long list of rather frighteningly consistent complaints:

https://plus.google.com/111091089527727420853/posts/9mA8XCdu...
https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/BKwDFRxJYqT
https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/LTr6RedEeVF
https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/QzCGxPkhNd8

As for finely crafted, I've got about 2000 lines of CSS I've written to take G+ from what Google shipped to this:

https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/...
Buy a Unicomp, they make the Model M now. New (not 20-30 years of cruft) and USB.

http://unicomp.com/
Bitcoin needs to be understood before it can be used by someone. People's ability to understand bitcoin is the current bottleneck to bitcoin adoption.
I would change that Courier or any Dovecot with a Cyrus IMAP implementation... it really rocks in terms of stability (and works smoothly), is fast and replication :)
I got two from the first batch - one from each supplier. One runs 24x7 at home as XBMC (which is little-used by the family), a VPN server, a small file server, and to record audio from a couple radio shows I like to timeshift. The other is in a box with a BrickPi board, camera board, and a LEGO NXT robot platform that I intend to turn into a running vision-based robot if I ever get time. I'm ready to pick up another Pi just for demos and maybe a 4th for PiMAME.
lol - bad predictions live on the internet forever.
There is every reason to think that one of the UK's leading authorities on drug science might have some interesting ideas in this space though.
> Syntax highlighting had, for me, been somewhat of a crutch. I was relying on it to immediately highlight code errors

One man's crutch is another man's perfectly reasonable tool. Is a carpenter's level a crutch?

> When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours

I have trouble discerning colours and I still use syntax highlighting. I don't think that there are people that are programmers but unable to read code unless all of the floats are purple. The highlighting mostly just tells me "this parsed correctly" and helps my eye track where e.g. string literals begin and end. I don't really see a reason to give either of those things up. If it's distracting, you could easily turn down the theme to just bold one or two keywords and string literals, which solves both of those two problems at least. Maybe go crazy and reverse the background on obvious syntax errors like unexpected symbols.

I rarely want to focus on the code itself and more just want to focus on the problem. Immediately highlighting code errors seems like a perfectly nice thing to do to that end. If I could just write a bunch of code quickly, riddled with syntax errors, and click some magic "okay editor, fix away!" button I'd be fine with that too.

To each their own I suppose.
Letters of Note: TO A TOP SCIENTIST
Looks fun, definitely gonna give this a try.

But where are you going to find a $300 pool table? That seems absurdly cheap :)
There are also safety nets in the west like social security, disability benefits that give you the courage to take chances and pursue your talents.
In India you either become a software engineer or live in poverty.
Unrelated but I have used Vimium too. In my opinion Pentadactyl for Firefox is far better than Vimium. Firefox can also be as fast or faster than chrome if you enable pipeling. Then there are also countless other plugins for Firefox that can improve productivity.
Hey Hadley, you can get anaconda without giving us any contact information.

http://continuum.io/downloads
In C it's easy enough to define your own macro (I like to call it "require") which behaves similarly, but doesn't "abuse" assert. Not so in Python, though.

It is silly to make the most, convenient form of error checking subtly wrong, and then castigate programmers as lazy for using it.
My ideal keyboard would be a Microsoft Natural with Model M keys.
Device security is a must, that looks like a showstopper, if at the very least rotten apples in the NSA can take your bitcoins anonymously you are in trouble, and most people don't have enough clue on how to be secure (i.e. average windows users) to put "real" money there.

And of course, big adopters. For services and digital goods is a natural method of payment. But it should have some price stability for that.
Mechanical keys have a much better feel to me, and you don't end up with so many blunted impacts, the finger movements are much more natural and much less stressful.

IMHO, YMMV etc etc.

I can also go much faster on a model M or cherry.
"I'd pound the keys on any keyboard, regardless of whether it had positive clicking."

My experience is the reverse, I have a couple cheap mushboards at work and the variability of force means I have to hit each key exactly the same each time (bad) and have to pound the heck out of it because the A key takes about twice the force of the F key (however small) and tiny variations in striking angle results in dramatic change in force required. So my hands have to be in exactly the same position every time and I have to pound the heck out of it. Luckily this is a secondary machine I don't have to type very much on!

On the other hand my model M at home is smooth as silk so I can microscopically vary my wrist positions with no change in force required, and decades later the force required is still more or less constant across all keys and lower than my mushboard at work.
Company I work for has offices all over the place. Every time I go to one of these places for meetings, the offices are usually empty.

Most everyone I work with is telecommuting. I do sometimes miss goofing around with folks in the office, but working in boxers is the best perk ever.
Assertions are also a great way to say: "this should be true, if this is not true, the code behavior is undefined."

Carefully using assertions is a great way to see if you are building your code wrong. Like a way to tell you "you're trying to fit the wrong lego piece in".
It would need to be better than a credit card for the average consumer.
Agreed, this keyboard is just awesome. I own a Thinkpad laptop and one of these keyboards at home and work. Perfect key sizes and not very loud. But if you do need that feeling of getting some work done or type up a stern email or two, go ahead and give your keystrokes some oomph. I'm always pleased with results :)
How old are you and what's your oldest code online?
Price stability is one major factor.

Unstable currency is bad for both consumers and merchants. When the volatility is high, it is high risk for people that hold that currency. Consumers and merchants are not interested in hedging their currency risk and rather focus on using the currency.

Let's say that the value of USD fluctuates 10% per day, most people would not hold USD; they would rather hold a currency that is stable or move to gold. Same thing is happening with BTC.
I think it's time for <irony></irony> tags on HN.
OP here.

I am a lurker on HN and often find programming/technical debates that rage around here amusing.

I am curious what the age distribution and general programming/geeky background of the HN crowd is. I am going to guess it probably skews younger.

Me:

33

oldest I could think of:

http://bit.ly/9EKSur

Used to hangout at Slashdot and CodeProject way way back.
Definitely, thank you for the offer. I'm running through the install now but will send you an email once I've run a couple tests. I see your contact info is listed on your home page.
Of all the categories we might seek to protect, be it race, gender, religion, etc., past convictions strike me as the least worthy of protection.

Certain types of convictions (especially drug-related) are more likely to affect Blacks and Hispanics[1], so at least in theory overlooking prior convictions would also eliminate a racial bias in hiring.

1. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2012/03/13/...
Don't know about he current device but Leap Motion can cover a football field. I don't think we'll need to wait too long and the tech will be even better and more developer friendly.
I understand Bitcoin, I just don't see any personal benefit verses my existing credit card, bank and investment accounts.
You're being too pessimistic. Depth sensing is not that complicated. Even vanilla stereo vision has gotten really good in the last few years and will only get better.
I've no problem with syntax highlighting as a concept, but invariably it's only designed for white or black terminal. If you need to use something else, like light gray, then certain colours of elements disappear due to low contrast.

Much like the colour output of ls; beautiful on black, largely invisible on anything else.
Neat. You might consider setting the setInterval to something lower than a second though. It'll be more fun to play that way ...
hell must freeze over... twice
I wonder when this will ever work on e-ink readers.
Criminal record or not, having my own consulting company sounds pretty nice, especially if you can already find employment as a contractor or at startups.
Here in the UK, the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act means you only have to declare a criminal conviction for a specified period (three to ten years, depending on your sentence). Exemptions exist for certain professions, mainly those involving vulnerable people such as medicine and teaching.

IMHO this approach strikes a very good compromise - it allows for reformed criminals to re-integrate into society, without allowing recidivists to hide their criminal past.
Because people behave irrationally as regards convictions, and this produces an undesirable class of essentially unemployable people who are thus incentivized to commit more crimes because they are unable to work. It's entirely appropriate for government to regulate to prevent the perpetuation of this socially undesirable phenomenon.
Ah cool, I do the same thing (with arecordmidi)! Would really love a web interface if you make one.
"When I read a book, I don't want parts of speech highlighted in different colours"

I do! In long conversations in novels I occasionally lose track of who is currently talking; normally it's really obvious as the next page of text doesn't make any sense until I backtrack to find where the speech got switched, though one time I finished a whole book where my protagonist had the wrong gender because I didn't realise that the prologue and the main text were written from different people's first-person perspectives...

It also reminds me of some anime fansubs, where series with lots of characters would have each character's subs written in their hair colour, which is really helpful for someone who has trouble disinguishing similar foreign voices from each other :P
It's probably both factors added on top of each other. There are other countries where politicians want to appear tough on crime, yet they don't come close to the US in incarcerations.

And the bribery definitely happens. As someone else pointed out already, a juvenile prison bribed judges to convict more kids. But I've also read about a state (Arkansas?) that has a contract with a new privatized prison to provide a guaranteed number of inmates for some time into the future. And you can bet they lobby for tougher sentences too.

Tough on crime can lead to terribly injustice, but for-profit prisons are guaranteed to lead to terrible injustice.
You might have your own opinion on what information is relevant to an employer. However as a society, right now we only protect certain categories, like race and religion. An employer does not have to prove that all information they use is relevant.

My question is why are we seeking to protect a category of people who have been placed in that category by a particularly fair and rigorous process? And if a particular crime is not a big deal, then it shouldn't be a felony in the first place!

As a moral principle, I don't see why, if you are allowed to judge a person based on their personality or character, you cannot judge them based on acts which by their nature reveal a lot about that person's character.
Yeah, I don't understand why no backlight is not available. The screen can obviously do it, because it goes into that mode when it is "off".
Volatility must be reduced. BTC's price fluctuations reduce its usefulness as a store of value. I'm curious if the Winklevis attempt to list a bitcoin ETF is a play for this: an exchange traded BTC security could make it easier to hedge currency risk.
What a noble gesture. On an unrelated note, I have some domains parked of my own, and I realized this is a great way to use them - help drive traffic to apps. And perhaps if he makes enough money from the app, he'll buy the domain to make a landing page for it. Plus it's really great to see a domain thats not parked with those stupid ads.
Thank you! Very proud of that series. You know, I foolishly tried pitching it for a couple years to traditional publishers, getting told "we love you, this idea, but we just need to change a few things..."

Inevitably I'd pass and then finally came to my senses and approached The Verge after appearing on [On The Verge.](http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/25/3114567/on-the-verge-007-l...) Their setup was so impressive that I realized I needed to work with them.

The rest is history! We're already figuring out Season 2 and some other fun things... as I've traveled across the country on the Without Their Permission book tour, loads of people have asked for Small Empires: Their City (we're NYC for season 1). I've got a plan for scaling the project. Stay tuned and thank you so much for all the support.
How reliable are they as always-on 'servers' wrt running off an sd card? Doesn't it wear out the card in a few months time if you consider all the writing to /var/log? Anyone had one running for close to the two year's it's been out now?
Does your startup really need to hire in-house developers?
I have had RSI off an on over the past 2 decades. There are only two types of 'primary' keyboards on which I have no issues: my model M, and a curved layout keyboard (using a microsoft 2000 keyboard these days). I think they work in different ways. The curved layout avoids straining my wrists altogether, while the model M changes the 'quality' of the strain to something less harmful. Of the two the model M is definitely the nicest to type on. Anything you type on it feels important. It is too loud though, so I don't use it anymore. Also, my typing accuracy is much higher on the curved layout of the microsoft 2000.
Show HN: Hackers News tracking made easy
Why thank you! That was a fun Q&A. Here's that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsdYblcTHCk
The majority of beer consumed in, say, UK is not "proper beer" in any sense, it is huge bottles of ethanol-solution designed to be cheap and get people drunk, and with some coloring and flavoring to make it somewhat tasty. The same market can easily be filled by huge bottles of the same coloring/flavoring with short-acting benzodiazepine, if only it was legal.
Change line 28 to something like 200 ms and then it's quite playable:

}, 200);
unless you're writing color forth code http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ashleyf/archive/2013/11/02/colorfort... in which colors have semantics.
On the contrary, if he only sells to end users, I don't see the need for the long and expensive certification (especially as he is based outside of the USA). This is not intended - I hope - to replace hospital ECG machines, but rather to provide quick insight at home.

I think it would serve the purpose better if he uses this money to make it user friendly and polished.
Why on Earth would monetary stimulus to the lending markets create consumer demand? Should we really continue believing that demand is supposed to come from credit rather than wages?
Agree and disagree.

In the long run: agree. In the short run I want the smarter people, want the dumber people later. (Or the cognitively/educationally less fortunate or farther along.)

In the near term I'd rather have the people most willing to take risk because that's also the period where there are the most risks and the most kinks to work out, polish, hedge, etc.

Later? Eventually? Welcome the less able to understand or the less able to take risk or take a loss.
Please don't spread this bullshit. I hear it every once in a while and cannot understand why people repeat it. There's nothing you can tell about the company from the TLD. It's just a string. It's like saying "don't trust companies with an E in their name".

Yes, I own an info domain. Because I liked it and it was cheap. That's it.