skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vast majority of successful software is arguably based on antiquated principles.

People seem to continually blame X11 as the source of all of Linux's woes, completely ignoring the history of computing.

Most high-end workstations were UNIX-based at one time, and the graphical interface ran on X11. People forget that Photoshop, Internet Explorer, and Adobe Acrobat Reader used to be produced for UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

X11 is not the primary issue at hand with Linux; nVidia has proven that repeatedly.

At most, I'd be willing to agree that X11 is not optimally architected for local rendering context, but again, I don't think that's going to make the huge difference that people seem to imply.
But the JVM not having reified generics is a mostly a blessing for Scala. With reified generics, your language's type system can essentially be only as powerful as the VM's type system, and I think it's clear that Scala today wouldn't be the same if Sun had gone the reified generics route.

(Still, it would be nice to have specialized generic containers for some primitive types in the JVM)
Even the new red is painful on my eyes. I navigated away before I finished reading, and when coming back here, it still created an afterimage on my retina.

I recommend a much more muted background, especially for the textual portion of the site. Run red banners down the side if you must, but change the text section to a more readable contrast.
The interesting article kindly submitted here reports:

"His finding: Less than five percent of languages in use now exist online.

"Much of that gap can be attributed to the fact that the languages people use vary widely, in terms of scale and geography."

Well, yes, little-used languages, and especially languages with small numbers of speakers that are also geographically limited to places with limited provision of the Internet, will not likely be used on the Internet. Whether or not such languages are still used in family life or for local community interaction is a distinct issue.

I am multilingual, as disclosed on my Hacker News user profile. The number of languages in regular use on the Internet is more than any one person can learn in a lifetime (most claims of one individual being able to speak dozens of languages fluently are very badly exaggerated) and every one of those languages, from multiple language families, is very likely to stay alive for a long time. A person who speaks more than one language, as I do, can choose to use different languages in different circumstances, as I do. Indeed, for many multilingual people, "code-switching" is part of signaling a switch to a different tone in conversation (say, from serious to humorous, or the other way around) or signaling "social register" (whether the person you are speaking to is being treated with friendly intimacy or with distant deference).

So I am not worried about this, on the whole. Other comments here posted before mine talk about the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (that "language shapes thought") but the strong version of that hypothesis is certainly untrue. (For one thing, human beings don't always think in language, but often also in pictures or in music.) Diversity in language will not go away because of the Internet. If diversity in language diminishes a little bit, while humankind enjoys better health, longer lifespans,[1] and other benefits of increasing worldwide prosperity, I will feel wistful about that, because I am curious about all world languages, but people should be at liberty to decide what languages they use, and when.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
Nope, we need a lawyer everywhere to issue shares certificate and doing many other things.
> There's an estimated 20 million Ubuntu users worldwide, probably another 10 million or so of other Linux distros.

And there's 60 million Mac users worldwide, and it was asserted that that's not enough for a good gaming platform.

You can't have it both ways. If Linux is a good platform for games (and it may be), then OSX necessarily is as well.
Looks great, wish it worked, pressed run and got this: "It looks like you have an error. Look for the red exclamation mark next to your code and fix the error."

Looked for the red exclamation mark, didn't find one.
Infamous Hacker Creates SkyJack To Hunt, Hack, And Control Other Drones
But is it so similar? There aren't many (any?) real world problems that you can apply economic theory to and get incontrovertible answers to. Studying mathematics can get you there at least some of the time.

I agree it is very important to understand something about (beyond introductory) various approaches to economics if you want to understand how key people involved were thinking about these problems. Here the use of the methods are more important that their accuracy or precision.

For that matter, understanding politics (something neither maths or economic thinking does well) is probably much more important to your stated examples.
Ooh, no.

I really don't consider email nearly reliable enough for any important logins.

It might work if I have a password in my password manager as a fallback, but then just using the password manager would be the way to go.

Edit: Actually this could work as the fallback for if I for some reason don't have access to the password manager, so I might use it but not for the intended purpose.
The problem is teachers! One of my relatives is taking Community College level math right now. I was helping her with some homework, which was multiple choice. The problem was simple, find an area of a triangle. We did the problem, and the answer was not among one of the possible solutions. I quickly double checked my work, making sure I was right, and we decided to mark none on the problem sheet and give the right answer + show work. The teacher said that in this case you should always guess what the closest right answer is, and just mark that. WTF. The actual answer was roughly 65, the closest number to that on the answer sheet was 73.

Math in USA is taught like religion, you have to believe what you are told, and god save you if you ask for proof. I remember in School we were reviewing Pythagoras Theorem. I asked the teacher to explain why it worked. She proceeded to draw on paper a triangle with sides of 3 and 4 inches, and then measured the long side, and said ‘see,’ with a very proud tone in her voice. When I asked if there is any more definitive proof, she replied that “it’s a theorem, there is no proof, that’s just the way it is.”

I spent the first 6 grades of my education in Ukraine, admittedly in the communist equivalent of prep schools. There we were given math problems, and we were expected to solve them OR prove that they were unsolvable. At least one problem on every test was unsolvable, and they actually expected you to provide proof. My experience with college level math on US was the same, the teachers were smart and taught well. But Middle School and High School level math in USA is pathetic, in my experience.
I think day-long interviews are fine, and I think real-world work samples are fine, but the combination is pushing it a bit as far as what is fair to ask job applicants to do, unless you're going to have some sort of explicit and upfront agreement about a trial period.
The U.S. actually ranks pretty low among OECD countries in terms of rate of entrepreneurship. There is a strong correlation between a strong safety net and entrepreneurship.
Yes, there are many poorly written problems, but on the other hand, even well-written problems can have little basis in reality. Spherical cows in vacuum, and all that. When a question asks "You throw a ball at 80 km/h at 45 degrees, how far does it travel?" you could argue endlessly about air friction, the exact height of your hand when you let the ball go, Coriolis' force, curvature of the earth, and the fact that you can never throw a ball that fast... but you are not being critical. You're just being obtuse.

The point of the question is not to indoctrinate students that air resistance is negligible. It's to let students practice their knowledge of Newtonian dynamics so that they can later proceed to more complex problems (hopefully with air resistance) if they want. Context matters.

So what about the original problem? I agree that the students' expectation that "there must be an answer" played a role, but I don't think the expectation is necessarily a bad thing. There's a reason that all the textbook problems (are supposed to) have nice answers: it actually makes it easier for the students to practice and internalize the concept they're learning.
I'd say the difference is all about time.

Kima is awesome for startups, who need a cash infusion RIGHT NOW. This can often save a startup and make the difference between the startup shutting down and it becoming a billion dollar company.

With YC, it's a very long process as it roughly takes 4 months from applying to money in the bank.

So Kima can give startups a fat cash injection, which is good for startups who know exactly what to do and just need cash, nothing else. YC is more for long-term startup building, getting into a community, relocating, becoming a Silicon Valley startup etc.
And it's not like one is stuck with Option either.
I think the ability to choose which abstraction is the best for a specific use case (Option, Either, Validation, Future, etc.) is the major benefit over languages which just bake the handling into the language.

Sure, those languages could just ship with additional classes which did that, but the problem is that they wouldn't be able to use the syntax sugar which is built-in for the special case of nulls as well as other language constructs like Scala's for-comprehensions which work for all types of a certain shape, not a single, built-in special-cased item.
> but you take away the ads, and Google can't afford to do tech.

Therefore, ad company. But not tech company? Why are they mutually exclusive?

I wish I could add sin qua non to the catalog of informal fallacies. Google's existence depends on a number of factors. E.g. I could say "Google is an engineering firm because without engineers, it wouldn't exist. QED." I could say "Google is a web company because without the web, it wouldn't exist. QED."

Sure, Google generates its revenue primarily through advertisements. But since the Page Rank Algorithm is its flagship product, I think it's also fair to call Google a tech company. I.e. the ads per se are made by other company's marketing departments, not Google itself. Calling Google a tech company is useful for distinguishing it from companies which also generate revenue through ads, but make a dissimilar product. Like television for example.
WebFonter
Your smartphone as a 3D scanner
alphadogg, you have been hellbanned for more than 2 years.
An interview is a two way process. The employer finds out about you, you find out bout the company. There are interviews where I thought my skillset was a complete mismatch, but got the job, and others where I got scared off by what appeared to be far too much enthusiasm for the company (seemed kind of false to me). I also realised I would be getting 8 days less holiday than I was on.
As someone who has used both, I have to give this battle to Node.js and Socket.io. The ease of use because of the common client/server code almost blurs the line between the client and server and makes it almost a pleasure to use. Whereas in Play/Scala, there isn't a libary I can use for both the client and server, thus I either have to write my own client library (or use one) and then write my server code. From a maintainability standpoint, Node, in this particular use case, just demolishes Scala/Play.
When I tutored sixth grade math, it was not uncommon to see kids who guessed that 7 + 3 was 9. When you are that far behind in math, your only possible approach to the subject can be weird heuristics that make no sense.
Resigning from my own business: Reasons and lessons learned
> In a middle school algebra class we had a word problem on a test that had us divide by the number of cards in a deck of cards. I didn't think this was a fair question, because it assumed that everyone knew how many cards were in a deck of cards. I went to the teacher's desk and whispered this concern to her and she said "Come on, even my 5 year old knows how many cards are in a deck of cards."

Just for reasonably-common playing card decks, I can think of at least three possibilities -- 48 (standard pinochle deck), 52 (poker deck w/o jokers), and 54 (poker deck w/jokers). And in middle school -- since there was a lot of card playing in my house -- I probably would have been aware of all three.
InCode now has Digg-style links - Come share your links
My first native language is not English, nor is the second language. I say good riddance, humanity will prosper more without linguistic barriers.
Limited Theories of Engagement
Uh, where can you use "head"?

$ git show head
fatal: ambiguous argument 'head': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'
$ git show head --
fatal: bad revision 'head'
$ git version
git version 1.8.4.2
This tutorial will eventually serve as the intro into our full tutorials (which unfortunately still require you to download Xcode :), but it's going to be really useful for us to reduce friction for devs getting started. Also this was our submission for CSEdWeek's Hour of Code next week, we're pretty excited to get more kids exposed to programming!
If you look carefully you will see the ad business is dying (well at least it is commoditizing) For nearly 10 quarters in a row Google has had negative growth in their CPC numbers and they have only covered that up by expanding the volume of ads they show (no you are not imagining their web pages becoming more and more 'monetized')

Here is a chart taken from their quarterly reports:

Paid Clicks	Cost Per Click
Q-2-Q	Y-A-Q	Q-2-Q	Y-A-Q
2011Q1	18	4	8	-1
2011Q2	18	-2	6	12
2011Q3	13	28	-5	5
2011Q4	17	34	-8	-8
2012Q1	7	39	-6	-12
2012Q2	1	42	1	-16
2012Q3	6	33	-3	-15
2012Q4	9	24	-2	-6
2013Q1	3	20	-4	-4
2013Q2	4	23	-2	-6
2013Q3	8	26	-4	-8

For reference that is Quarter over Quarter, (Q2Q) and year ago quarter (YAQ). In the limit they become AltaVista in 2020 or so. So they are really looking at a pretty definite timeline of having to develop an alternate strategy or downsize the company significantly.
I up voted you despite the forgotten 2 dogs who cannot possibly have both survived for 15+ years.
I don't think there's any reason to (potentially) embarrass the wait staff. Always be polite, and tip big.
Don't mistake cynicism for insight.
SEEKING FREELANCER - Bay Area (SF, PA)

Looking for a lead developer who has previous experience scaling a start-up. I have all the financing necessary just looking for the first coder that can help bring my App Sharing idea a reality.

Email: kendall[at]oceanviewmarketing[dot]com
It's a good thing Google managed to scan all of the world's old books then, and also that they are working on perfecting translation between dozens of these languages. I doubt much will be lost. Plus, we can see it as a new beginning from now on, when everything will be in English, and all new science would be used by all.
That plane had the smallest crew of hijackers, perhaps because one member of the hijacking plot was then under arrest in Minnesota.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zacarias_Moussaoui#Capture

That the arrest was not followed up by a FISA court order allowing more investigation of the plans of the arrested person was a major screw-up on the part of the FBI.
Does Inkscape have any raster modification capabilities?
Not all "buttons" are composed solely of vectors.
I think students (who are themselves a product of their parents and their culture) are also part of the problem. When students don't try, they fall behind, and when they fall behind, they have no choice but to make silly guesses.
sudo vim /etc/hosts

Enter the following:

lifehacker.com 127.0.0.1

www.lifehacker.com 127.0.0.1

save and quit
Well, there is a probationary period here (US) too but it doesn't make much sense employing 20 developers just to figure out which one you want to join full time.
Absolutely nothing, except maybe panicking some passengers. Planes are pressurized, and the exits all open inward. It's not possible for a human being to overcome that force.

http://www.askthepilot.com/questionanswers/exits/
Looks cool. Is there a github repo somewhere where we can send pull requests?
It's missing stuff like systemctl.
Well, if students could use the laptop during the test, since its a no-answer question that comes directly from well-publicized earlier research, at least some of them would google it and probably get the correct answer.

This doesn't, of course, address the fundamental issue that the test reveals, but it would impact the results of the test.
It's my word against his, I'm the developer, I know what I'm making. I have no problem in him not believing me. The problem is disbelief and then commenting on it, which is fruitless as I'm not in a position to preview my app to the public, nor is he in any position to comment on an application he hasn't seen or used.

Take my experience for what it's worth, if it's worth nothing then skip me.
Hemingway on Not Writing for Free and How to Run a First-Rate Publication
I've heard great things about YourKit but their web presence is amateurish.

The jProfiler site seems much more professional and informative. I can't help but wonder if that extends to the product and support as well.

The pricing, at least for single per-seat licensing, is almost identical.

I primarily develop server side applications and would really like to get a better insight into how that code is performing.

All of the reviews I have seen are pretty old and it seems both products have been heavily updated recently.

Why did you choose YourKit? Have you compared it with jProfiler?
You're rather nastily assuming that people who currently hold low-level jobs should hold those jobs, for their entire careers, and that therefore, any education unnecessary for their menial jobs is unnecessary for them as human beings.

That's one small step for illogic, one giant leap for inhumanity to other people.
"and yeah, how many security researchers would post if they got caught? survivorship bias at play."

Used to something similar at play with stock picking. You heard about people's successful investments but never their losses which they of course kept quiet. This is of course more old school. Now people are much more open about airing daily laundry. My guess is that Schnier would blog about something that didn't work not that that detracts from your point. A lesser known security researcher would not necessarily act the same. Not to mention separately that "getting caught" means you have an interesting story for the press.
In my opinion (as someone who works in NLP & computational linguistics), preserving more data on how languages can work is the most important bit. Languages do influence cognition a little bit, but not as much as most people think. Nevertheless, most people think that they do, and if you only know a few languages, its easy to get stuck thinking that, oh, this is how all languages must work, and this is inherently how people think.

This is a problem in contemporary linguistics- the "big" languages are really heavily studied and theories are developed to describe them accurately, nevermind that they may completely fail for, say, Xhosa or Straits Salish. The bias has been decreasing over the last few decades, but getting a really good idea of the real fundamental underpinnings of human language depends on all those minority languages not disappearing, undocumented, before we're done.

Of course, there are other reasons which are important to people working on other fields- languages are strongly tied to culture, and when a language dies, so does a lot of other cultural knowledge and practice that may be useful to ethnologists, psychologists, philosophers, etc.
Yeah, there's some weird stylistic choices with it, but overall pretty cool. I'm compiling to see if some interesting things I've done actually work or not.
I used to (and still do) run the opposite direction that the crowd is going. Its just that I am choosing my tribe - and my tribe is full of people who also run the opposite direction from the crowd.

So I have to be careful to spot both the larger crowd, the crowd that is now my tribe and when people are dropping FUD scent markers over their desired territory.

In short - robots still look like a hobby that will pay off the same way writing games for the ZX 80 or Atari will pay off.
As a native French speaker, I agree with you.
For technical discussions such as programming or engineering it can be argued that using one language (nowadays, obviously English) encourages cooperation and progress.
However, in other domains, languages carry much more than a practical means of transmitting information, they bear a whole culture with them.
Two examples which I hear and read a lot in the English speaking world but which are either impossible to translate in French or at least to utter without ridicule: "successful" (as in a person), and "evil" (as in, a dictator).
Too very unrelated services, I wonder what they are planning.
Maybe if we were considering a situation in which Einstein was growing/producing his own food.
"It would obviously be tragic and damaging for someone to attack "defenseless" passengers with "traditional" weapons, but -- in my eyes -- it's not terribly different from a random attack in the street or a shopping mall."

Well one way it's different is in the availability of emergency response personnel. In the air you are confined in a small space and much further from help.
Great variety! Some of these reminded me of [0] Spider-Man Cartoon Maker.

[0] - http://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Adventure-Spider-Man-Cartoon...
I think most other providers feed telemetry into STK (http://www.agi.com/) to get the animations. There really isn't that much effort involved if using STK.
Thanks! Yeah sorry, we're under a lot of load right now as you can imagine. Keep trying!
When Ryan originally announced the transition to Joyent, someone asked if node would be moved to Joyent's github repo. Isaac replied: "I hope not". But now he asserts that Joyent owns node, and considers it a "cash cow".
Your Future USB Charger Will Be Reversible
This just in, we all need resources to complete our mission/goal, even if getting those resources takes a lot of our time and effort and isn't directly related to said mission/goal.

Example: I'm saving up so one day I can work for free for NGOs (like Watsi).
Study and Travel: Learn Ruby on Rails on the beach in Ecuador
Since this came up again -- we recently did an analysis on a data-set of over 100 million of the app store reviews across different countries. English and other european languages were extremely prevalent, with english dominating. The people who tend to use fancy smartphones etc are much more likely to speak english and are also exposed to english language content, apps, etc. For example, in Israel, 51% of reviews are in english while only 46% are in Hebrew. More examples: http://blog.sensortower.com/blog/2013/11/27/what-apple-app-s...
How about this, then: otherwise good people often end up acting in bad ways when they and their families' livelihood is at risk?

And it's not always possible to just go find a different situation.