skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cargo-cultism is the duplication of the appearance of functioning systems or structures in a context where they are nonfunctional or incorrectly functional. Copying the functionality of an existing system isn't a cargo cult.

The persistence of features in programming languages you're describing isn't a cargo cult because the resulting products work. In addition, there's several benefits of conservative language development: it's generally easier to write compilers; existing programmers will find it easier to adopt a language that mostly resembles ones they already know; and some unfashionable but useful features may be retained.

This is more of a "worse is better" situation than a "cargo cult" one.
Zurich team develops walking, jumping, balancing, Cubli
Author: "Malcolm Brown is director of mission and public affairs for the Church of England".
I predict one which automatically makes everyone look naked.
Excruciating evidence that supports Moxie's position.

Vuln rewards should exist for two purposes:

1)An act of good faith on the part of the developer that says "I am interested in securing my product and I won't prosecute direct disclosure"

2) The Dev knows exploitable vuln discovery has value, but cannot compete with black market pricing. Instead, the reward is a token of appreciation for a shared code of ethics.

I wish bug bounties could compete with the budgets of nation states. They can't.

Companies shouldn't pretend to compete. Shame on telegram for stupidly false promises.
"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."
Sounds like C# needs destructuring assignment. In Ruby, you're more or less just returning an array that gets destructured immediately -- "return a, b" works the same as "return [a, b]".
Netflix uses FreeBSD 9.0
App name: iED
In this case, it doesn't actually matter who he is, so there is no need really. Our responses would not be different if it were someone else saying the same thing.
I like it. Another idea I had would be to make the client show the balance multiplied by some derivative of network hash rate. Since network hash rate is pretty closely correlated to fiat exchange rate (through mining profitability) this might result in a currency that was more easy to reason about for most people.

(instead of a coin being worth 5 times as much as when you bought it, your wallet would contain ~5x as many coins, with the balance increasing and decrease with market volatility)
Why give the prize for not doing what was needed to win the prize, namely reveal the message?
In Europe you have the right to make such firms disclose all data that they have on you, and even to make them delete it after a certain length of time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulat...
I don't think it is necessarily exploitative, even in the sense you describe. Imagine a world where both person A and person B work 4 hours a day, and clean their own houses 4 hours a day. Person A, due to the nature of his work/skills, produces more per unit time at his job then person B. Both of them could make more money if person A spends 8 hours at his job, person B spends 8 hours cleaning both houses, and they split person B's earnings evenly.

Another way of looking at this situation is the marginal value of time. There are 24 hours in a day. Assume you sleep for 8 of them, you have 12 waking hours. At this point, you might be willing to spend a hour cleaning your house. Now, imagine that you spend another 8 hours at work (but have the same amount of total income). In this situation you only have 4 hours of free time. In this case, you would likely be willing to spend more money to keep that free time, because you have less of it. This is also why we often pay more for overtime.
That's not all we need. We also need the will to fund it. Non-telco electric-type utilities are not sleeping in piles of money.
"The one place they are pretty convenient is in languages (like Python) where multiple return values from one function can be used as multiple input parameters to another."

Python only returns a single value - a tuple. It's just that there is symantic sugar on the functions side to fold multiple values into a tuple, and on the side that's returned to, it's simple value unpacking.

You can validate this in the following way:

>>> def foo():
... return 1, 2
>>> x = foo()
>>> isinstance(x, tuple)
True

The unpacking of tuples into arguments is simply more syntactic sugar, if very useful syntactic sugar.

In short, while I love Python, it's still returning just a single value - a tuple, that gives the appearance of returning multiple values.
>What they did and said qualifies as hate speech here, so yes 2 years would be within the scope of the law.

Hate speech laws, while may sound like a reasonable thing in theory, on practice naturally allow for very selective enforcement (mostly due to their inherent vagueness - any political speech can be qualified as hate speech if there is a strong will to do so) and thus are used as extremely effective tool for oppression of political opponents by the powers-to-be while people like you (who seems to not understand or know that selective enforcement of laws is a form of tyranny and such enforcement actually voids those laws) are blinded by the fog-screen of declaration of "illegality". For example, nobody was arrested (less sent to prison) for publicly praying to God in support of Putin and his regime which is as much a hate speech toward the Putin's opponents as a public prayer to God to chase Putin away is a hate speech toward Putin and his supporters.

As result, in their application in real life, hate speech laws is mostly very unjust and unfair laws and mostly used as a tool of unjustice. A right and just action like challenging powers-to-be on their unjust actions or statement of facts unpopular with the powers-to-be may very well result in conviction under such laws. And even without actual convictions, such laws result in unjust chilling effects on political opponents of the powers-to-be.

Btw, this is why one of the greatest thing that US have and that sets US so far apart and ahead (as this thing is missing in the rest of the world) is the freedom of speech, the 1st Amendment.
Posts from Nettuts for 12/22/2013
>Just for the sake of argument -- We tell software startups to get their MVP out as fast as possible in order gain feedback and improve the product... yet we smack down hardware vendors who have done exactly that?

Well, something half baked is not always an MVP. Sometimes it's just half baked and should not have been presented in the first place.

Not to mention, software startups products don't cost hundrends of dollars to buy and test. In fact, usually they are free. So, pushing a half-arsed hardware to buyers? Not so wise.

The original iPod was a MVP launch ("no wireless, less space than a nomad, etc"). It took it several years to get large disks, video, wi-fi sync, etc.

Google Glasses? An ill-thought, hastily implemented product, merely combining non-optimally a few pieces of stuff you already have (voice recognition, eye displays, small video cameras etc) as "innovation theatre".
Not a good time for Boeing with the whole South Korea fiasco. I am really not fond of the US government picking the same company for both the F-35 and F-22. Of course, I still don't think the the F-35 specification was a good idea in the first place.

[edit] To explain how weird the world is, here is a agreement between Boeing and Saab http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_...
Well nice knowing you Telegram. I don't see a good way for them to recover from this. First the bogus contest that Moxie debunked. Now this. The best option is to close shop, open a new company, new names and do something else.
What about them? Should we all go stand outside a Lexus dealership for the 90% of the population that can't afford a luxury car?

Since when did access to computer software become a basic human right? This kind of fanatical ideology around software disgusts me. How is it any more acceptable than religious fanaticism?
I'd go get a job with the competition so I knew how faster their systems are. Also a ridiculous question.
As a side note, I didn't notice it was google translate until half way through the article. It's getting really good.

Is Russian an "easy" language to translate to English?
It takes all sorts! and the best way to prove your chops is to just jump. You can fork HHVM and start by picking up a few of the easier issues and working through them. Our engineers on that project are really friendly and helpful. What can I say... dive in! What is the worst that can happen?
After using the Lua for several projects, I'm not convinced that a variable numbers of return values is a good idea.
That's rather specious reasoning.

Any employment-offering entity (EOE) $foo can be substituted in the pace of Boeing or Lockheed in that argument: "the mob", "the Stasi", "revenge porn sites", etc.

So it really does boil down to intrinsics, after all. If we're going to commit ourselves to ending perennial abuses perpetrated by EOEs that seem entrenched and averse to wisdom and self-reflection (like large military contractors, or our so-called intelligence agencies)... then perhaps it should no longer be socially acceptable to work for them.
The best part is that the debunker wrote this in Russian. The language barrier has probably been responsible for them getting so many users. So now everyone is very clear that Telegram is snakeoil.
New API call: See What's Trending on HN
I think this is incredible. Kudos to @tamershlash for organizing this. I hope we see a number of innovations coming out of this weekend, and actual products. I would love it if you could post a followup after the event or during so we can stay up to date on this.

Is there any way those of us in the United States can help you guys with this?
I'm excited by the insight and modesty of this guy. I will see to it that he gets a mighty prize.

It's great to see how open software can leverage the power of the community to find weak spots and become stronger.
"at a market rate" doesn't mean "at a current price", but "at the amount people would be willing to pay".

Selling such a high position would lower the price of bitcoin on all the exchanges, until enough people would be willing to buy them.

So, for example, if you wanted to sell 100k BTC on MtGox in an instant, you could do that. It's just that the price would get down to around $120, and you'd get "just" $35M. (real numbers, via http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD )

As for Coinbase - as far as I understand, they don't hold a bitcoin position, but use internal trading and external exchanges. So both the money and the btc would come from people willing to buy Bitcoin.
It's not the perfect code, but it does give good results. Check it out: http://hnify.herokuapp.com/get/trends
I noticed it instantly (the title). I also noticed many irregularities throughout the article. I don't know if you're a native speaker, but to me it was obviously computer translated.
Great work! I hope this person gets a big piece of the prize, if not all of it. Perhaps they should have waited for the challenge to be expanded. (That's what I'm doing. I just hope nobody spills the beans first.)
I don't know about net metering, but you can build a serviceable system with 12 volt PV cells, recovered UPSs, and some lead-gel batteries (which you should store outside). You can use car alternator diodes for overvoltage protection. Should I draw a schematic?
It's in the blog post that we are active contributors to the project... :)
Ahh, seems that it doesn't like images without extensions.

I fixed your image, will open an issue to fix it.
Git wedding-speech
Product Release & Conquering One's Self
Capitalism needs a government that succeeds in protecting individual rights. The situation you describe is one where property rights were not protected. That's not a failure of capitalism, but of government.
The article acts like there's a chance that Boeing is in serious trouble, but the US government has programs to prevent the loss of defense manufacturing capabilities.

The status quo is, if a product is not needed in the US, but the manufacturing base to produce it is, to cover a potential major conflict, then the US sends foreign aid to another nation, who in return agree to buy our defense products. In the end, the government just wrote a direct check to a defense contractor to build a weapon for someone else, who probably didn't need it, but it shakes out as being 'foreign aid.' For a good example of this, check out how many tanks the Egyptian government has.
TRIM is just one component of an optimal SSD configuration, and it's somewhat overrated. It should be on by default, but it's not the only consideration for good SSD performance.
From the headline I thought this was a stunning result from academia. Then in the first two paragraphs I read the words "Pope", "Rush Limbaugh", "Archbishop", "Jesus", "Marxist", etc.
I ran into Mark Cuban at Think Coffee in NYC. A small group of NYC tech people formed around him and a few started pitching him.

He listened and engaged, but said, look, send me an email, I read every email I get. Cool to see that play out with a positive outcome for this guy.
If you have access to currency markets, absolutely, EURO/USD is incredibly liquid. At the point of sale, I do not have access to this market, so my Euros are not liquid. If they accepted credit cards (the shop I was at did not) and I had, say, a VISA that was denominated in Euro but which the bank would change into USD, my Euro would be liquid.

Another way to think about access: if I give a homeless man in the Mission 20 Euro, is that useful to him?

The actual form that you have the asset in matters.
I am not arguing for bitcoin or dogecoin. I am arguing against the dollar, and the notion that the dollar isn't backed (just) by force.
Computers are better than humans for enforcing most of stuff like this. Automated rewriter, make it so!
How To Hire More Engineers In Less Time
Perhaps we're not talking about the same thing. For any national currency, a bank has a way of resolving your request to exchange their currency for a local, more acceptable, currency. That is part of what the banking system does, and BitCoin eschews.

In my fictional example, if an exchange didn't have deposits to cover the conversion they would go to their currencies central bank for the $90M and then exchange the BTC they got with the BTC central bank for $90M and pay back their overnight 'loan' from the local currency bank. How does that work for an exchange with BTC? Do you clean them out of all the dollars they have? Then what happens to other people who have BTC deposited and want dollars out? How does that work? Do the later people have to wait until someone buys some BTC and puts in dollars? If you have two people waiting for dollars out, who gets the dollars you just got? First one to request to get out? best customer? first one you can satisfy their complete withdrawal?

Those questions are the "liquidity argument" if you want to call it that. Who pays the price for not being able to convert coins? The exchange? The customer? Lets say the price of BTC plummets, people head for the doors and want their money in dollars now. Does the exchange give them dollars that they won't recover? Or do they wait on all withdrawals until the number stabilizes and the pay out at that price? In the former the institution takes the risk, in the later the customer takes the risk.

I totally get the BTC market as an awesome way to exchange markers securely. I'm not sure how it gets to be a currency without something providing the banking function. (one of those functions being liquidity as the author points out)
I had to struggle to read it. I mean:

After logout, one of the key interlocutors for chat will regenerate, and to check that I have the same key as the source, I can only look in his eyes phone.

...did it translate "iPhone" to "eyes phone"? I'm not sure. If that isn't what happened, then something far more horrible must have.
To be clear, it's my understanding that playing music or generating artificial noise won't actually do much to stop this attack. Listening to some good tunes will definitely help distract you from worrying about attackers stealing your private keys, though!
But why should I support "free software", especially when people like the FSF want to convince me to sign away my rights as a developer of such software?

I don't support restrictive, people-hating ideologies. And neither should you.
In Hawaii, PV was subsidized for a long time. Unfortunately they've cut those back earlier this year. (Around January 2013)

Since electricity is so expensive[1] here many people could reclaim their investments in as little as 5 years. With the subsidies reduced, it may be 7 years. That's incredibly short if you compared Hawaii to the mainland.

[1]http://www.heco.com/heco/Residential/Electric-Rates/Average-...
> More seriously, ask the question: what relationship between multiple values is useful for returning from functions but not useful enough to be a data structure that can be used in other parts of code?

Sometimes there are pieces of data which are hard to create a cohesive type around. That is, you can compose an new type from other types, but you can't really add any behavior to that new type. This is exemplified by the Tuple type in many languages: it's basically a hack to treat disparate pieces of data as one, and it doesn't offer any way to operate on its own data.

Here's an example from a relatively typical idiom of parsing an int from a string:

int parsedInt;
if(int.TryParse(s, out parsedInt))
{
Console.WriteLine("Parsed {0}",parsedInt);
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} was not an integer",s);
}

The problem here is that TryParse() really returns two values, one of which will be tested to see if the parse was successful, and the other of which is assigned to parseInt. You could test that the string can be parsed and then get the parsed value in two separate functions, but this would be inefficient because you'd essentially have to parse the string twice. I'm on my Mac so I'm not sure I'm remembering this correctly, but I think C# forces you to put the "out" there, which I think is good because it clarifies that parsedInt will be assigned. However, I think there are a number of ways in which the following (hypothetical) redefinition of TryParse (and C# syntax) feels a lot clearer:

var parseSucceeded, parsedInt = int.TryParse(s);

if(parseSucceeded)
{
Console.WriteLine("Parsed {0}",parsedInt);
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} was not an integer",s);
}

First of all, the programmer has been forced to assign the success boolean to a clarifying variable. Second, the call has a clearer structure: the input are on the right side of the = and the outputs are on the left.

Let's look at some other possible solutions here:

var parseTuple = int.TryParse(s);

if(parseTuple.Item1)
{
Console.WriteLine("Parsed {0}",parseTuple.Item2);
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} was not an integer",s);
}

This results in some confusing code. Item1 and Item2 are very poor names for the things they represent.

IntegerParseResult parseResult = int.TryParse(s); // Didn't use var here to clarify what this code means.

if(parseResult.ParseSucceeded)
{
Console.WriteLine("Parsed {0}",parseTuple.ParsedInt);
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("{0} was not an integer",s);
}

This is a little better, but the creation of a whole new type seems heavyweight, especially given that this new type provides no real functionality. It's tying together two pieces of data which are about to be separated and never used together again (consider, for example, that instead of printing to the console it might return).

I guess the argument I'm making here is that just because a function returns to outputs doesn't mean those outputs have a meaningful relationship that would justify having a new type.
I don't think a schematic is going to solve the problem at hand. It's more of a local political issue.
Actually, in a free market overproducers try like hell to increase demand.

They can try, yes; but if they don't succeed, they go out of business. In systems that are referred to by the term "capitalism", OTOH, they can often get the government to force increases in demand--for example, railroad owners in the late 1800's who had failed in open competition went to the government to get laws passed that gave them exclusive rights to certain routes.

Also, a free market means that if people choose to buy something, then that something gets made, whether or not it's something that you think "ought" to be made.

with our mega-cities there are few forests left

Do you have any actual numbers to back up this claim? AFAIK there is still a lot of land occupied by forests and other "natural" environments. I live near a major city but there is plenty of forest an hour's drive away. Maybe you need to get out more?

if we turn away from one advertisement we are just confronted with another and another and then another

I think that depends on how you choose to spend your time. Yes, if you spend a lot of time watching TV you can't avoid seeing a lot of ads. I solve that problem by not watching much TV. Similar remarks apply to other kinds of advertising.

Btw, I'm not trying to say I'm in favor of advertising; I'm not. I think most of it is a great waste of effort. But ads aren't aimed at someone like me anyway; they're aimed at people who are actually influenced by them. So if you really want to get rid of ads, you need to find a way to convince people that they shouldn't be influenced by them. Which, btw, is what a true free market requires anyway: it means the responsibility for making sure that your buying decisions reflect your actual values lies with you.
I hope the administration's lawyers just walked into a trap.

Ordinarily, when the government asserts its state-secrets privilege (which dates only to the 1950s), a judge privately reviews the evidence to see whether it seems plausible that proceedings would reveal state secrets.

Now that the admistration has asserted its secrets privilege in this case, the appellate court can very appropriately circumscribe the privilege, ruling that it cannot be asserted to prevent a challenge to activities that appear unconstitutional, prima facie, under the private review that is already required.

That would be a great outcome, one that might not only roll back the NSA's surveillance programs, but also reinvigorate our most important check on executive power.
An awful lot of PV break-even analyses assume the cost of grid electricity will remain constant. Hawaii's electricity is oil-generated, and I suspect oil prices will continue to rise rapidly in the next decade.
The guy (Cuban) is on TV for heaven's sake, and has a blog. I am sure he gets a zillion pitches already. This won't be new.

It is nice to see it work out for someone.
Hawaii has the highest cost of electric in the nation. I used to live in Hawaii, and working from home, my monthly electric bill was $500-$750. Hawaii also has year-round sun, being close to the equator. The state also has rebate programs for solar panels. When I was looking into it, if you got a 5-year loan, it would be cheaper to buy the panels than pay your electric bill.

There's no (legitimate) reason Hawaii's electric should be so high. They just have no incentive to reduce prices, and they have to keep their 6-figure salaries. I knew plenty of people that wanted to build solar/wind farms, but the electric company either wouldn't accept their electric at all, or would give them pennies on the dollar.