skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
nil is a safety/convenience trade-off -- it can be dang convenient, but it's just begging for hard-to-spot bugs to appear in your code. To use your example:

> [str doSomething]; // If you really care if it happened or not, then introduce a check for nil

Usually I actually care if the code I wrote did something! Writing nil checks everywhere would be non-idomatic and really annoying. (Something like Haskell gives you the best of both worlds, arguably.)

I agree the language has gotten much better. I've worked on two ObjC iPhone projects, one before ARC and blocks, and one after. The impact of blocks, especially, is incredible. So, so, so much nicer. (Also object literals are a nice recent addition.)

That said, the criticisms voiced in this article, which I agree with and think are real problems, are unlikely to go away -- they're just too closely tied up in the core of what objc is. (You're never going to have a nil that throws or a type-safe containers in objc, I'll predict right now.)

I do overall like the language. Especially for GUI code, which tends to have lots of stuff doing relatively straight-forward things, the

[soSomethingWithaThing:thing otherThing:otherThing frob:someFrob]

style of method naming, while verbose, is awesome -- the code is extremely easy to read, and it's well-neigh-impossible to get bugs by mixing up the method order. (Compare this to e.g. python, where you have neither type system nor naming to tell you if you mess up parameter order.)
To expand: SCOTUS has consistently ruled that corporations have some of the rights of a natural person _because_ "corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose" [0]. If I get together with like-minded individuals in order to do something we each have the right to do individually, in most cases, we retain the right to do it as a group (key word "most" -- as you say, which specific rights corporations should have is far from easy to sort out.)

In particular, free speech is a right of "every ... association representing a segment of American life and taking an active part in our political campaigns and discussions" [1] -- unions, guilds, consumer groups, religious groups, newspapers, political parties, and so forth. Those groups are made up of individuals united for a purpose, and their choosing to unite should not penalize them by restricting their ability to speak. Justice Kennedy made a great comment to this effect: "wealthy individuals and unincorporated associations can spend unlimited amounts .... Yet [under the Austin decision] certain disfavored associations of citizens — those that have taken on the corporate form — are penalized for engaging in the same political speech .... When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful." [2]

[0] Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. v. Pennsylvania, 1886. Yes, that's eighteen eighty six.

[1] US vs UAW, 1957

[2] Citizens United v FEC, 2010 - page 40 of Justice Kennedy's majority opinion
So SteamOS is not affiliated with Gaben or Valve?

I am confuse.
The "don't be evil" mantra is going to be an order of magnitude more important in the future, than it has been so far - that is if Google still cares about following that mantra.
What Bitcoin Arbitrage Can Teach Us About the Crypto-Currency
That's freaking awesome!
People need to watch this Important message
I've spent a lot of time pair programming, and my normal tolerance for pure watching is 10 minutes or so. I think that's pretty typical; seasoned pair programmers have a lot of tricks to make sure control shifts frequently so that people don't get board and mentally disengage.

That said, I really enjoyed watching this stream for a while, and will come back later. One of the best parts of pairing is picking up tricks. Watching Notch work on the graphics was amazing. I've never done video games with modern tools, and seeing how somebody quickly iterates, always coming back to a running demo to see how it feels was great. In 90 seconds he added snow.

As somebody else mentioned, it was also great to be reminded that even legends are human. He's constantly making little mistakes, trying little experiments, being puzzled by something. If anything distinguishes him from the people I've paired with, it's his cheeriness in the face of adversity.

Also, I love this bit I just heard: "Does Santa shoot? Does Santa shoot? No. I think Santa swings his mighty sword. A sword? Yes. Santa wields a sword." It's so easy to think that well-tuned games spring full-formed from the minds of their creators, but real creativity is like that: continuous exploration and experimentation.
From the Disconnect FAQ:

On Firefox, if Disconnect is the first blocking extension you install, then Disconnect will work even if you subsequently install other blocking extensions. On Chrome, Safari, and Opera, it's the opposite: in order for Disconnect to work on these browsers, it must be the most recent blocking extension installed.

Do you know what effect this has on extensions like Adblock Plus and NoScript? If I install Disconnect first, are those addons going to do less for me?

This is the first I've heard about installation order affecting how well the addons work. I'd like to make sure I've got the right info before informing others.
> I've found the real cost factor is not so much the robotics platforms [..] but the hurdle of tool acquisition

That's what membership in your local fablab is for.
In his [autobiography][1] von Karman has a whole chapter (or two) dedicated to justifying why deporting Tsien just based on suspicion was a bad decision.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Wind-Beyond-Theodore-Pathfinder/dp...
So if you compare the U.S. and Nazis they are therefore foils of each other? While I agree that the U.S. falls short of being a true democracy for all of those three bullet points, I'm a little confused about Wolin's reasoning. His argument seems to be:

* In Nazi Germany, the state dominated economic factors, in the U.S. corporations do

* Nazis advocated political action, U.S. does not and does not advocate voting

* Nazis mocked democracy, U.S. made it its ideology

* Therefore Nazis and the U.S. are very similar

Doesn't anyone see why this is problematic reasoning? He just made three points that showed how the U.S. and Nazi Germany have flawed political models, but the connections seem to be few and far between. I get that he's saying that they are both nondemocratic systems under the guise of democracy, but it seems a little farfetched using this argument.
Just when i thought quadcopters were cool ... I can see how, with a little chinese-fu magic the chinese could make space travel commodity. Or at least moon-droning. Certainly looking forward to pay a (short) visit to the first moon colony.
I'm also trying to do a search in this library and had no success. Not even using Google image search.
The collection is useless if one can not search for images inside. It's not pratical to browse through millions of images to find one. If there is any way to search for keywords in the collection please tell me.
Now, when i first looked at this i had been awake 24 hours so may have not noticed those things due to sleep deprivation. However i seem to distinctly remember not any of the clarifying language about concepts and envisioning being there 12 hours ago, so i think they saw the negative feedback and updated their website.
Didn't Christiaan Huygens author a system of mechanics of light in rainbows[0]? — he developed an angle prediction system in algebra, if I recall.

[0]: http://ww2.odu.edu/~jadam/docs/jadam_geometric_optics_and_ra..., http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14725/14725-h/14725-h.htm
The new YC batch is from 23 countries
Likewise, deciding to buy lunch is not somehow invalidated by being really hungry. In a sense, we consider the pressure of our appetite to validate the purchase of lunch. Decisions in response to circumstances and prevailing conditions are completely valid.
Okay, your heart is definitely in the right place, but if you're going to assert yourself over your electronic gear at the airport, do not for heaven's sake do it by playing cute half-clever tricks with hidden volumes or self-destructing software. Do it by politely but firmly refusing to hand over passwords; then the worst that's at all likely to happen to you is that they send you home without your gear.
It used to mean something... I wonder for how long
However there is no air on the Moon, so how to conduct the heat from the mining machines?
What is a Quant?
After watching The Wall St Code -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAGdwHXfLQ -- I was asking myself, what a "Quant" in the context of HFT is.
I haven't done enough UIKit stuff to really comment on it, other than to say I also still find a lot of the conventions confusing or at least weird and also find that the documentation fails to answer my questions.

I also don't get the distinction between a UIView and a UIControllerView. In C# land I always associated view=.xaml and controller=.cs. In obj-c land both views and view controllers have a .xib and .m/.h, so it's not clear to me how responsibilities are divided.
Indeed, or your local hackerspace, etc. In fact, the poster I commented to would probably find people there already working on the sorts of platforms (s)he envisions.
What you must know about content marketing for 2014: Dramatic increases
دانلود ترانه جدید جعفر دیس زدبازی با پخش آنلاین
دانلود ترانه جدید جعفر دیس زدبازی با پخش آنلاین
After watching "The Wall St Code" -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEAGdwHXfLQ -- I was asking myself what a "Quant" in the context of HFT is.
IR radiation?
The Taliban side didn't follow any kind of war laws. What legal protection does the POWs of Guantanamo really have?

For instance, afaik POWs from lawful sides in conflicts can be kept until the conflicts are over. The Afghan war is still raging, arguably. And the Guantanamo conditions are hardly much worse than the horrid US prison system.

I have seen this subject discussed, but never in a serious way. E.g. please don't write that they should be treated as civilians or something, the point of the Geneva conventions etc was to give POWs some protection, it is just stupid to then argue that to ignore those laws would give better protection.

(And I have no idea how many of the people at Guantanamo are innocent, as dragonwriter claims to know. The people making claims on that subject aren't exactly to be trusted if they really would know!)

Sigh, I guess I deserve downvotes for the stupidity of asking a tricky legal question on newsYC which doesn't have to do with startups. :-)
2014, the year of Linux on desktop! (meh)
" in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered "normal" rather than corrupt.[6]"
>they will eventually look around at all the security measures and consider the risk to their life and liberty to be too great to justify leaking information further.

This never happens in espionage. Once you go down that rabbit hole even a little, the people you're giving information to own you. They have the power to instantly ruin your life. If you stop giving them information, they inform on you. Most spies never wanted to be spies. They got sucked into a crappy situation by making one crappy decision, then they're stuck with it forever.
>The vast majority of photo management these days happens on the web and in HTTP-using client applications, where sharing, not editing, is the killer feature.

You'd be surprised. There are many of us who don't do social photography and use desktop photographic software and Windows' built in image management stuff.

And Microsoft make more money out of us with Windows licenses than Facebook do with social photography.

The right client bet was the choice of doing it where you please, which they offer(ed).

However, they're pushing everything onto SkyDrive now in an "everything everywhere" approach which is a bad move.

Surprisingly Apple and DIY (Linux or own software) are the only people offering choice still, or at least not nagging you about moving to the cloud.
IVPN: cheap, anonymous, multihop VPN based in Malta
I use http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/Protege to create a Base Ontology first. It can export to UML with the right tweaks and plugins.
Well good is debatable but arguably C++ meets this criteria. I work on many iOS codebases that have C++ layers.
You have never hear some one say "thats a big ask"?

Eg Vince cable saying "the royal mail was not under priced" leads to the response "thats a big ask"

Its more a political slang/jargon term that formally correct English.
How not to craft your drip emails
java + spring mvc
What about the bricklayer who would spend 1 week thinking about a better way to build wall, and two more weeks to tune concrete formula and concrete wall casting? He would eventually raise the wall in half a day, but he'd be one week late, wouldn't he?
I highly recommend watching a talk given by Erik Nieves from Motoman at the most recent RosCon because he talks about the state of the robotics industry and why this "gap" exists in a very accessible way.

http://vimeo.com/67044628

Two reasons why I think the gap between getting started and being able to build something useful exists is that robot parts are still much more expensive than we expect them to be and the fundamentals of robot movement are much more difficult to learn than we expect them to be. Unfortunately, I think those two factors discourage a lot of engineers early on and is why the size of this community is so small.

I feel very fortunate that I have a Kuka YouBot to hack on. The company I'm trying to get started with two friends wrote a proposal that got accepted into the sponsored track of a competition Kuka is running. (http://www.kuka-labs.com/en/network/innovationaward/) After setting it up, it's clear why this is a 20,000€ robot. But before you can actually DO anything useful with it, you have to be able to understand kinematics and dynamics as well as how to get path planners to talk to controllers. And then the really powerful stuff becomes possible once you incorporate computer vision, which is also not an easy topic to understand. It not surprising that most of this work is being done at universities by grad students.

The state of ROS today feels a lot like what Linux felt like to me back in the late 90's. There are lots of issues with dependencies and programs not compiling correctly. Documentation is severely lacking. But there's lots of enthusiasm from very friendly people to help each other work to make things better.

What makes me worry is that many of the advances in ROS came from Willow Garage and Google is buying up many of the companies that spun out of Willow whereas a lot was made possible in computer vision due to the sensors made by PrimeSense, which was just acquired by Apple. I hope the Google vs Apple rivalry doesn't slow the pace of progress in open source robotics that was making the dawn of non-industrial robotics seem not so far away.
Originally the Senate was not elected by the people directly as democracy, but selected by their states as a republic. Direct election of Senators required a Constitutional a amendment.

Don't abolish the Senate, abolish the amendment that screwed it up.
good news.
On one project I did that, very previse reporting. The customer wasn't happy about it, wondering if I was bullshiting him.

At another customer's there was a time reporting software. But instead of reporting real time, we were instructed to report normalized times over an 8-hour work day.
Buster's Squirrel Game Lite
Buster the Squirrel was robbed of his prized Giant Acorns by the forest critters. Help Buster steal back his prized acorns in this tree jumping wacky action packed adventure! Using your arsenal of nutty weapons you will fight against an army of Birds, Spiders, and Bees who are hoarding the nuts! In the Squirrel Game you will face the challenges of strategic jumps, dodging and shooting enemies on your way to unlocking your Giant Acorns.

The Squirrel Game is a platform game with physics based jumping and shooting. Simple controls let you quickly alternate between jumping and shooting. The game was designed to be easy enough for kids to play while still providing challenges for adults to master.

- 6 themed Adventures featuring 180 exciting levels
- 3 weapon types
- 9 enemy types
- Advanced physics simulation makes you feel like a real squirrel
- HD graphics designed for tablets and phones
- 12 catchy songs
- Zoomable gameplay
- Map mode to preview levels
- Shield Powerups
- 4 squirrels to choose from
- Win gift cards and discounts with Kiip rewards!
Did you miss them clearly 'weaponising' bigdog? :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptyV1cpE14o
Don't dismiss Ashton. He may be goofy, but he is into technology and has an army of followers. When he tweets, his 15 million twitter followers retweet like crazy.
Europe may seem exotic to some but I think we should focus efforts into improving our knowledge about other planets instead of Earth. What do they have to offer, what are they named. etc
Has anyone else read Avogadro Corp? Software created at Avogadro Corp (an obvious play on google) becomes self-aware and, unbeknownst to anyone, begins to order military robots to defend important off-shore data centers from pirates. However, the defensive robots do serve the secondary purpose in that if the artificially intelligent software is discovered and is to be destroyed, then these machines are to defend the AI. Just an interesting instance of life imitating art.
Nice post, Dan. I'm a sucker for linear methods myself, but I do think they tend to be way less good for classification than for regression and inference (e.g. collaborative filtering). The LSA example is a bit unfair since you're clearly going to need the number of dimensions to be proportional to the number categories for that to work at all well (and if you need to figure out the number of dimensions to use, a scree plot should help). The ability of the deep learning approach to get good separation in only two dimensions is very impressive.
Looks good but how is it different from https://www.pushbullet.com/?
I know there are a lot of you, and there always will be. But how many more Windows Phone licenses would Microsoft be selling if they were the online photo sharing platform instead of a distant also-ran?

WinFS was the wrong strategic move because cross-device availability and network effects dwarf whatever value you can get out of a local store. It's exactly the reason web mail won for consumers.
I love this! Bit of feedback: if I were to use this to share photos taken for a client, I would love a way for my clients to be able to download all the photos in one go.
If not caring about being judged were a tangible resource, and I had larger reserves of it, I know I'd be more successful. Fear of judgement makes me do all kinds of dumb things, and often subdues me into inactivity. It's something I'm working hard to combat.
求别逗。
"Smarter" is a pretty judgmental term.

I know we live in the era of "there already is a library for everything", but for small problems it may still sometimes make sense pick from the ideas you like and code directly. This can take less time than learning whatever huge family of encodings committees have agreed on, is less likely to bring in cross language calling requirements, less likely to bring in specific system requirements and less likely to bring in licensing requirements.
No, er, it's worse than Python.

`[nil methodname]` returns nil. Python et al have the decency to crash to the ground, look embarassed, and stop running.
Europa.

I'm not sure it counts as "exotic" by every definition, but it is probably far away enough...
Absolute bullshit, 50:1 is the ratio of civilians casualties in the Israeli conflict.

http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/05/06/combatantcivilian...

Your ignorance is middly acceptable because US media and other information reporters are biased or coerced into giving bad statistics about the issue:

http://www.lawfareblog.com/wiki/the-lawfare-wiki-document-li...
Heamôn-Vidli De-Salème | Steppes | CD Baby Music Store
That may be the main ingredient, but that's not what it says on the tin.

EDIT: More to your point, of course, if BHO (or GWB, or WJC, or c.) were the sort of person who could conceive of major changes, he wouldn't have been allowed within a mile of the presidency.
Appcache Facts
The author exaggerates the compatibility of Linux drivers on a given Laptop.
IMO, DC not having a vote is a far larger issue. The senate may not be 1 man 1 vote but DC has hundreds of thousands of people with no say in federal laws / taxes and rather limited self rule.
I think this is the best title on HN today. Especially the "According to Rainbow Gravity" missing the theory bit.
$0 commission sounds surely alluring, but what about exchange fees? For some securities, exchange fees are greater than broker commissions.
Generally not. I work in retail and we're not really supposed to take PC games back, though this is often fudged.

Console games we'll take back if our disk tester says they're faulty.
...ideological minorities who don't like the majoritarian consensus and seek to delegitimize it.

What's wrong with that?
You should probably append [pdf] to the title.
On the surface this appears to be true. But, like all things in a constant flux, it's a lot more complicated than it seems. One observation though, I've always wondered if Orwell's novel would act as a warning to those who seek power. In other words, 1984 acted as a inventory of obvious psycho-social obstacles to avoid while attempting to control the masses.
Tendons on linear motors seems like a good approach. http://www.roboy.org/

Also, there are shape memory alloys and they are essentially a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars. You could concievable bundle them together to make a larger muscle, but you will probably have to do some active cooling if you want any sort of decent response curve and even then motors can be a lot faster.

What I think we could really do with is a linear actuator with a simple built in clutch that doesn't take power to hold a position.
Yeah, but my tech job is going....
So they released an unsupported publicly accessible API?
Some context is appreciated... signup page is pretty sparse on the details. Sounds like they'll charge for API access and margin trading.

https://www.robinhood.io/faq/
>At least in javascript it's easier with the && operator:
str && str.doSomething()

Mixing a Boolean check and a potentially side effecting function in the same line of code is a neat hack, but it seems like it would make code harder to maintain. Also, what about handling the non existence of str?
It would be better, but it's still enabling the US military. Even from the perspective of US allies and beneficiaries it can be distasteful to deal with companies that directly enable the DoD.

My own politics aside, there's a pragmatic concern: the NSA is part of the DoD. If Google is fulfilling military contracts, then it's going to be hard to do that and to push back hard against NSA.
Yes, that is the biggest feature people have asked for. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do it.

Quick question. Would it be ok if you clicked a link and then it emailed you a bit later when the download was ready?
In C/C++, dereferencing the null pointer is undefined. That is a hell of a lot more dangerous than doing nothing. ObjC's "defined to do nothing" behavior is a significant step up from the other languages in the "fast, compiled, bare metal" cluster (C,C++).
May be thats true, but it is irrelevant to my question.
Vaguely disappointed, I thought that this would be an implementation of PLANNER. Still cool though.
looks awesome. an area ripe for disruption.
I would recommend tor button, which makes it easy to use firefox with tor
Reminds me a lot of what "Push Bullet" on Android enables me to do.