skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are some comments about the quality of the books, let me share my opinion.

When a book is written for Packt (this is my experience):

1) The author submits his draft chapters to reviewers (there are two or three reviewers per book) - and they provide feedback. The author then has to address all comments from the reviewers, either to correct something (or to make it clearer and understandable) or to reply why it was not corrected. And this goes back and forth until everything is sorted out.

2) After that, technical editors review all chapters and if they feel that something may not be clear enough to the reader or it may have to be double-checked by the author, they will contact him and he'll have to update his drafts again.

3) Then, when the technical editors finish their thing and provide pre-final copies of the chapters, the author has to proofread everything, in order to make sure that everything is as it should be. If the author finds that something is not right he sends feedback to the editors.

You can see that there are many people involved on Packt's side, and (in my case) every one of them cares about quality. At the end of the book the author is even contacted to give an opinion on the quality of the technical editors he was working with.

I know this because I recently authored a book for Packt, named "OAuth 2.0 Identity and Access Management Patterns". It was released few weeks ago.

About the book, I posted an announcement on my blog: http://blog.thisismartin.com/book-oauth-2-dot-0-identity-and...

It is really sad if someone who doesn't know English well accepts an offer from Packt, as I can see in the comments here - there are some cases like that. I hope that they will improve in their selection of authors.
> if (Session["startDate"] + "" == "")

This feels horribly familiar. I'm not sure to recognize the specific language used, but there must be cases where one would like to target empty of filled with non processable characters strings only, and let null and falsy values pass through. This kind of use would typically need a line of comment, but hey...
Was Manning's treatment due process? Because it seems she was stripped naked and kept in isolation for several years.

I think I'll take the exile, thanks Barry.
NSA surveillance needed to fight terrorism: Putin
A magic bullet for hiring quality devs
well, if a tech exec says it...
What do you mean by that? if (constant == variable) type conditions?
This reminds me of this one, which is quite common:

return foo == null ? true : false;
It just lends more credibility to the "this is just a mgrunin sockpuppet" hypothesis elsewhere in this thread. No way in an 8 person company, you "don't have the ability" to talk to one of them.
EBay Remote Code Execution Vulnerability Demonstrated
It's specifically a local decrease in entropy.
I think does yield as stated in docs. Go have coroutines so there is no need in generators.
Here is the list of people who Obama has pardoned:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_by_Bara...

It looks like many of them were just erasing the record of those who committed minor crimes a long time ago. I wonder how you get to be so lucky.
> Facebook (PHP)

Facebook (PHP transpiled to C and compiled into a binary)
They're just passing the political bill for the USA to pay, of course it wasn't the reason for the deal, things aren't that simple. But politics is everywhere, the USA is always trying to get it's way, has used spying to cut deals, spies on everyone, etc... I'm all for all countries everywhere playing this card every time they can, why not?
Why the Feminist so rarely have any arguments on their side. From my experience it is never addressing the underlying issue. And almost always personal attacks. This doesn't show your strength, it just shows weakness and lack of arguments.

Where are the feminist fighting for 50% workforce presentation in construction? Answer that! Don't call me names. Just answer. Where are the feminist fighting for 50% of all divorce cases ending in fathers staying with children? Any arguments? Or just the usual aggression, name calling?

Why you are surprised feminism is not taken seriously. If you don't address the issues, the issues address you. And you are done. Despite personal attacks.
I'm guessing you don't realize that the plus operator has less precedence than the == operator.

That if is equivalent to if (startDate + true)

EDIT: I was wrong. I haven't slept.
Webrick comes in the <a href="http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/webrick/rdoc/ind....

I explicitely mentioned that the latest release of PHP comes with the built-in -S server. But that before this, it was always either install *AMP of some variation, which is, frankly a lot harder. And even now, Whereas Rails requires a few commanline commands, a CMS like Drupal still needs quite some fiddling to get it ro run on your localhost. (Source: I have been professional Drupal trainer for years)

But let me note that neither three of these servers are anything good for production. But, for small (internal) projects, `SimpleHTTPServer`, `Webrick` or even `php -S` might suffice, especially when behind a reverse proxy. Yet of all three, Webrick is especially slow, and php-s is especially memory-leaking and unstable.
These are extremely minor points in the grand scheme of things. Seriously, read the rest of the page, also.

That's not saying that they may not be fair and relevant criticisms (but also not saying that they are - there's certainly pettiness in there). Nobody and no organisation is perfect, not by a long shot, and the inability to raise concerns at all with such a large operation would be a total failure of imagination.
With all that's being said about the NSA, and how we should add self-restraint, with all that the government is admitting about the current state of the NSA being bad, why not?

If it's that clear that Snowden did the right thing, why not pardon him? I feel that not pardoning Snowden is roughly equivalent to making a statement that people should be in the dark about the government's spying programs, and that the government should be free to spy on its people, unchecked.
I don't think it's a good idea to ignore facts just because they are inconvenient and/or some assholes try to abuse them.
Personally I avoid iOS because of their restrictions.
Investing on an iOS app is much bigger gamble than Android because of this.
Git-fun-commit command
It's better than

return foo ? true : false;

or even

return foo == true ? true : false;
which is why I mentioned this specifically: would this survey count Facebook as PHP, or as C? This makes a big difference on the outcome of "the amount of large sites running on language X"
I think that for games, where the UI isn't probably going to be native, there is no (major) reason not to develop cross-platform. Engines like Unity or libgdx let you do just that. Other than testing, I don't see how iOS compatibility would require significant effort over an existing working Android game which was written with a cross-platform engine.
And will it support Bitcoin ?
> You really prefer Python threading to anything?!

Sure. When I just want "run this task in the background, I don't particularly care about throughput but don't block entirely". There's a niche where a proper task queue is too heavy and shared variables are a perfectly adequate communication mechanism.

> Don't get me started on list comprehension, extra stuff to learn because Python lack real maps with real lambdas.

They're a nicer abstraction for many purposes. Look at their Haskell origin, or Scala for/yield.
They are more miss than hit but there are some gems in the there:

https://www.packtpub.com/object-oriented-javascript-2e/book
In spite of how it begins, this article can be read as yet another criticism of men, albeit an underhanded one. Two key points the author makes betray this:

"Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive."

"After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall."

To summarize, she argues that women are better adapted to the modern white-collar workplace while men, thanks to their brute strength, are better adapted to lower status blue-collar jobs, and nothing short of an apocalypse will put men back on top. There's certainly no rancor against men evident in this fact-based argument!

This end to the article is especially unfortunate because there should be some real concern about how men are portrayed in modern media. In children's movies, boys have become brutish, bullying antagonists to the protagonist princess more often than not. In comedies, the most common formula pairs a strong, competent, beautiful woman with a bumbling, slob of a man-child who will inevitably woo the lass with sweet intent more than anything else. Arguably, this probably reflects the fantasies of the bumbling, slovenly, men-children running Hollywood more than a deliberate campaign against the competent male, but the effect is the same. Action flicks glorify blue-collar men. The cerebral, hero scientists of decades past are long gone. Heck, even Indiana Jones is grossly over-educated by modern action hero standards!
Obviously the stupidity I'm referring to is the hubris in thinking anyone could build a filter for such a thing and _not_ have disastrous false positives.
If by "people" you merely mean "member of the homo sapiens species", then sure. But it doesn't change the fact that he deserves to be executed.
Type inference and Diamond operator in Java 7
Mark Zuckerberg Just Gave $990 Million To Charity
I think we should introduce <joke></joke> tags for use on the internet for when people are joking.
Sadly you are wrong. See an operator precedence list:
http://bmanolov.free.fr/javaoperators.php
What's the difference between this and Barclay's PingIt?
Or teach them to use their own heads and respect the fact that children are mostly just small adults? Nah, who has time for that... Besides we really like the idea that children are somehow innocent and pure, the same way we dress up dogs and cats in cute outfits for our own amusement...
Theft like this can happen on even the most secure designs but why did it take TWO WEEKS to be discovered?
A lot of these seem to be Microsoft technologies like C# or SQL server. Is that because the owner is more familiar with the MS stack? Or do MS devs have more to complain about?
Another question: Why are there so few African-American developers? Diversity at a developer meetup is a bunch of white guys along with a splash of Indian and East Asians.
/me calls credit card company.
That they (and anyboy else) can get away with that is one more simptom of a deeply flawed legal system. The honest integrants of this system should be ashamed, but they live in a parallel universe, where such things are considered good.
One is built by a corrupt megabank, the other by a London startup. Easy choice for me.
That pressure is not only external - it's also internal[1]. Often it's a wasted effort to try and treat your children in gender-neutral ways, they simply prefer to play with dolls and robots, and then you're just forcing your preferences on your children. Work with children and the extent to which our preferences are coded into our genes becomes even more evident.

An alternative conclusion we can draw from the statistics described in the article is that women are just as capable of pursuing careers in computer science if they so choose. The fact that there is a skewed gender distribution may not necessarily be a problem, but merely a difference in preferences. As long as we have no law or other system that discriminates against women or men, there may be no one but our biology to blame for such skewness.

[1] Behavioural gender differences become evident at very early ages, before any external pressure is exerted upon children. This is a widely studied issue, see for example:

Alexander, G. M., & Hines, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to children's toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus). Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 467–469.

Bailey, J. M., & Zucker, K. J. (1995). Childhood sex-typed behavior and sexual orientation: A conceptual analysis and quantitative review. Developmental Psychology, 31, 43–55.

Bauer, J. A., Shimojo, S., Gwizada, J., & Held, R. (1986). Sex differences in the development of human infants. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, 27, 265–273.

Berenbaum, S. A., & Hines, M. (1992). Early androgens are related to childhood sex-typed toy preferences. Psychological Science, 3, 203–206.

Liss, M. B. (1981). Patterns of toy play: An analysis of sex differences. Sex Roles, 7, 1143–1150.
Using SignalR and knockout.js to push data in real-time to the browser
I think the latest PHP APIs are the least of your problems if you're running sites with code that hasn't been touched in 15 years:

* new security threats that have been discovered in that time which needed to be coded against (In the last 15 years, a lot has changed with the approach we have to building secure sites).

* newer web standards and browsers - thus compatibility on the client side might now be an issue.

* different computing paradigms (we use touch interfaces where hover-over menus wouldn't function. There's a massive range of different client side screen resolutions and aspect ratios these days too).

* different methods of sharing content (for some types of sites, supporting OpenGraph and Twitter Cards is pretty important if you depend on your content getting exposure from "word of mouth").

* different user expectations (a 15 year old site is unlikely to look any good compared their modern counterparts. While that might not matter for some sites, if you're trying to generate traffic from the average layman, then they might be put off and prefer a site which is more aesthetically pleasing).

So if someone is trying to port 15 year old PHP code to a new server, then I'd expect they'd want / need to do a sizeable amount of rewriting anyway - regardless of API compatibility. In this instance, API compatibility is the least of their worries as you can at least just use the 'find/replace' tool in your text editor to fix renamed APIs, where as fixing the other issues (eg switching from the older method of dropping variables into an SQL string, to the current preferred method of parametrized SQL which negates the risk of SQL injection attacks) will take much longer.
I sometimes do that in PHP because I hate the equivalence between "", false, null, '0' and 0. Seeing true and false written out makes it more readable.
Down: 50 Mbps, Up: 20 Mbps
Location: Tasmania, Australia
ISP: Internode (NBN)
Does it mean if(1 + 1 == 2) is equivalent to if(1 + true)?
I probably should have included this link too: the PSGI spec itself (https://metacpan.org/pod/release/MIYAGAWA/PSGI-1.102/PSGI.po...)
A few of these are funny/wrong, but most just look like laziness or some minor confusion about language/framework specifics. Thedailywtf definitely has better content.
Target Hacked: Confirms 40 Million Payment Cards Affected in Massive Data Breach
Perhaps, but then, if that's how they were managing, then they could go out of business on a strong move up.

I think it's more likely that they are using a combo of reserve bitcoins plus actually buying on the market at the time you place an order. This is why, on some heavy volume days, you will see the message that Coinbase itself (not just you as a user) has reached its buy limit for the day. They buy at the price they quote you, then wait for your funds to clear ACH to deposit the coin in your account.

So, another risk Coinbase has is when a customer buys (prompting Coinbase to buy), then the customer's funds don't settle via ACH. Coinbase is then stuck with the coin until they can fulfill someone else's order. This might be at a loss if BTC has moved down. In fact, if a user places an order and BTC moved sharply down, it is likely possible that the user could purposely liquidate the bank account so the ACH would fail. I am betting they have seen this.

They have been toying with Instant buys as well, but having to adjust their requirements. In the first iteration, I remembered wondering how they weren't losing their shirts, as it was designed pretty naively, as if everyone were honest. Sure enough, they changed their requirements.

In general, they take on more risk than their customers, but one thing I do fault them for is failing to communicate changes in requirements, etc. And, apparently, they do need more robust processes, automated auditing, etc. It is the most reliable place to buy that I have found, but it definitely has some of the Wild West feel of BTC itself.
No need to panic over China bitcoin clampdown: BTC China
I chuckled aloud at that one, and (funnily enough) it rings true!
I also think that things like Modern Perl[1] are helping to move the community away from the "line-noise" style of Perl that it was (in)famous for back in the day.

1: http://modernperlbooks.com
I - v - vi - iv
If you want to make IT cool again start in the classroom
Some of those criticism are arguable. For instance one of them is criticizing higher paids in AIDS research arguing that it taking away professionals from the regular care. Well, yeah, that's a side effect and a challenge but it happens in any area where you gives incentives.
I still do not understand why they would have to store the credit card instead of just storing an authorization and transaction number.
Why not? PDL exists for numerical computation. Works fine.
Sadly, for that PHP-community, many developers outgrow PHP and move on.

Instead of the developers growing and improving, and so pulling the entire community upwards, many simply choose to leave. I've had this personally with Drupal: many, many years did I poor a (joined!) effort into getting proper TDD, OOP, deployment strategies into this CMS, but in the end I gave up. I mean: why put effort into making Drupal something it does not want to be; while a few weeks of learning a new language, the thing I wanted Drupal to become, already exists.

I think PHP is mostly a station in the career of many webdeveloper, before they move on to what are often considered "more professional environments". Sure, there are a few brilliant and very professional PHP-devs who stick around. But relatively seen, they are a tiny minority.
How does reselling work in this context? Are there any restrictions about selling this for $50-$60 in a retail shop?

Also, what are the return policies for Amazon in this case? I've heard about resellers buying out individual channels, selling the inventory at a markup, then returning unsold inventory to the original seller.
Aren't you afraid that by posting this you are going to attract a lot of unwelcome competition?
In context of majority… going Android first is sane only in these cases.

(1) You are willing to take far higher initial development/maintenance cost (for sanely working app) just to reach people with far less buying power.

(2) You need physically wired connection to user's device - no bluetooth - to connect a device where you can't make any assumption on hardware spec.

(3) You want to write an app where AppSore explicitly prohibits - such as spam, porn, piracy, illegal, malware, or potentially dangerous stuffs. (but does this make sense even on Android?)
You can probably do those with PDL.pm :)

http://pdl.perl.org/?page=screenshots/index
Another gem I'd like to point out is the book "Infinispan Data Grid Platform". It was my first purchase at Packt, thorough and well written.
Brief earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6930258

Target says the data is limited to cards used in the U.S. during the last few weeks:

https://corporate.target.com/discover/article/Important-Noti...
2014 in gaming
The need for notifications is just a symptom of an idiotic system overall.

When was the last time that a company offered you to notify you by (snail) mail when there was a letter available for you to pick up at their headquarters?

It's a workaround for having to poll multiple event (posting) sources. Which only arises because we have multiple event sources. Which is completely unnecessary, technically. (I am talking about the user interface here, of course - it's perfectly fine to have the software poll multiple sources, or, even better, to have some protocol-level notification/push mechanism, of course, but the user should not ever have to deal with it.)

That also does not mean that integrating with email, say, is necessarily a bad idea - but not in order to tell a human that they should poll some event source, but as an interface medium for the actual discussion (that is, essentially as a mailing list). e-mail supports much of the necessary basic functionality, and it's also an existing infrastructure that give the user one UI of their choice for all communication partners.
The word "fine" here is a mistranslation of the judgment. The court rewarded damages to be paid by the one sentenced. They did not issue any fines.

Fines and damages are two different concepts, because one is about restoration (damages), while the other is about punishment and repentance. The first is about the victim, and the second is about the state.

In this case, the court decided on $650,000 damages to be repaid to the rights alliance, and as punishment gave a suspended jail sentence and 160 hours of community service.

> If the risk of getting caught is small the fine needs to he high enough that ChanceOfGettingCaught*Punishment is far enough from zero that it figures in people's minds.

Thats not the point of either fines or damages. In a historical perspective, fines exist because other more inhumane punishments like beating, lashing and shaming were deemed inappropriate. In today's theory, (see http://www.criminology.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.74227.1328107386!...), it's more about providing a standpoint in society about what is acceptable and what is not.

It should also be mentioned that fines have a maximum of $600 per crime, or 150 days of a person's current income.

Damages on the other hand are only about restoration, and is not allowed to be issued as punishment. It is illegal for the court to issue damages as a form of punishment.
When I read about massive data breaches such as these it makes me wonder why we don't have a system in place to where we as the customer can generate a unique authorization code for a one-time charge to our cards without having to actually reveal our credit card information.

It's bad enough that someone can buy a card reader and walk down a sidewalk and capture credit card data by just being within a few feet of someone.
Panel calls for sweeping reform of US eavesdropping
1. Chargeback.

2. Better Business Bureau.

3. Federal Trade Commission.

4. Lawyer/lawsuit.

All of these are better options than whining on some Internet forum.
It seems likely that their card authorization system was compromised.
It's hard to know if a statement like that is serious or satirical, especially considering the many broken promises and human rights violations Obama is responsible for.

For example, didn't Obama promise to close Guantanamo Prison? http://www.npr.org/2013/01/23/169922171/obamas-promise-to-cl...