skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, the sensitive folk who object to GMOs will get shouted down soon, I hope, when people need food and it isn't there.

Myself, I look forward to microchips that manufacture carbohydrate and protein chains directly from electricity and air (water?). Then food, water and energy will truly become fungible commodities. And grain becomes irrelevant.
Everything You Wanted To Know About The Elance, oDesk Merger & Ensuing Backlash
advanced...really?
Awesome! I originally wrote the anagramica API so I could cheat at home while watching countdown, and then built a game on top of it. Always great to see a fellow hacker get inspired. The OCR is a fantastic addition.
1. Mobile devices are cheaper than PCs. One reason mobile ended the PC era is that the manufacturing economies of mobile devices are better than those for PCs.

2. Mobile connectivity is more available than fixed connectivity, even to the poor.

3. Touch interfaces are friendlier than PC interfaces.

So if you want to make a realistic comparison, find out what a person with limited resources is going to buy first: A smart mobile device, or a PC?
the main problem with that is that most of the big php deployments are moving at their own pace. So ... anything new can trickle down in years. And you rarely have the luck of finding clean slate php project nowadays.
Not sure. I've been less involved with Rust in the past few months.
I've spent some time teaching people web development (Ruby, Rails, Javascript) both as a professional trainer and as a volunteer through RailsBridge. I've seen a few motivated individuals go from non-coder to software developer in less than 1 year. Certainly you can get paid jobs writing code sooner, but these folks were doing real development in 6-9 months.

With an engineering background you already have a good foundation in problem-solving. I would recommend learning one language really well first. I like Ruby or Python for beginners. Javascript is very practical, but I agree with the other folks in this thread who compared it to C. It's lack of structure make it a hard first language. Then find a small open source project to get involved with. A lot of open source coders will happily mentor you if you put in the effort to contribute -- you can start by contributing docs and good bug reports. Get started, see if you like it. It's not easy, but it can be done. For me, it has always been fun.

By the way, I'm a she :)
Wealth is not zero-sum nor need it be, the only thing required for wealth inequality is that the current pool of wealth be heavily consumed and dominated by a small segment of people, leaving very little of the remaining pool for others.
Orbital solar is in development? I'd love to read more on that!
Is the standard of living really growing for everyone? Or are there more people now (%wise) in poverty ?

This is an honest question as several people have mentioned the standard of living argument before on HN. I've read however that the rich-poor divide is growing and thus am just wondering about this..
Design Pattern for Structuring Rails Apps
"C# - C# is replacing Java as the OO language of choice for big enterprise systems."

C# is held back by windows. I know there is mono, but enterprises aren't going to bet on mono. So I have to disagree with that.
Bad tools? In what alternative universe is PHP a bad tool?

It is one of the easiest to get started with, most documented, best supported and flexible tools out there for 90% of the things you see on the internet today.
Engineers are Scientists with thumbs was what I was told when I worked for a RnD organization on CIT's campus.

The corollary to that is "but the technician is the one who really understands it :-) "
Among Forbes top 20 billionaires, you'd be hard pressed to find someone who's made his fortune from natural resources.

A person who seeks value from society - value originating at the work of others - has to provide such value back. If all you can do is simple manual labor, you will need to provide quite a lot of it to purchase scarce items that have a high degree of inherent value (such as an iPhone).
I love this idea! It would be nice if the suggestions went into more detail, including, say, a test suite to measure success ….

Are there any similar resources for other languages?
When to "fire" a potential client - My 20 emails rule for freelancers
You wanna know why PHP is so popular and why many people chooses it?

Because it's so easy to get started using. Compare that to almost any other language out there that is a nightmare to set up.

At the end of the day the code if it works it works and PHP just simply works. Not for everything but for most things.
i do see fast forward, but how about adding a rewind special key? awesome interface, great work guys!
[Judge Leon] found the program’s invasion of privacy especially troubling given the “utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented"

I find it troubling that judges are considering a benefit such as crime reduction in considering right-to-privacy issues. Certainly many crimes might be prevented if we did away with the constitutional rights of the accused, restrictions on search and seizure, etc. but is that the world we want to live in? Do we all want to be subject to random, warrantless searches of our homes, computers, or bodies, or warrantless arrest and interrogation, if the net result is a reduction in crime?

The classic Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind here.
McDonald’s tells its employees to avoid eating fast food
Well the "swagtard" thing seems a little gauche, so I can understand why they're down-voting. But your point on the sunglasses is ridiculously obvious and it's pretty cringe-worthy that people are defending it as somehow not disrespectful and an obvious sign of arrogance.
Skin Builder - Online Tool for Skin Assembling
Now you are able to define custom colors and fonts for a web interface created with the Webix library. We are releasing Webix Skin Builder – online tool, which you can use for interface customization.
Somehow you've managed to completely ignore my point.
Maybe this will help: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/24/russia.politics
I used to be irritated by the number of "welfare moms" I see around town with smartphones. Certainly they should focus on their shoddily-clothen children first, right? Well I shared that thought with my brother, who has more experience with these kinds of things, and he explained that their smartphone is their only Internet connection. With Internet access becoming a necessary utility, a smartphone is the cheapest entry point to the Internet. Now I don't judge.
I don't think it's comparable to compare the 1-word "nodejs" with the 2-word "xxx programming" phrases.
That's true if you're considering making something.

On the other hand, if you are learning a language or platform in order to expand your capabilities as a thinker and problem solver, then community size is less of a consideration.
Korea Execution Is Tied to Clash Over Businesses
40 millicents? Or 40 cents? There's a difference.
Good. This is the kind of thing that law enforcement ought to be dealing with on the internet. Fraud, not spying and censorship.
I am not in defense of the NSA's mass surveillance program. However it would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would happen if, instead of caching metadata, the NSA required people to submit reports of suspicious behavior on their neighbors.

What would happen then? Is it possible people would become so suspicious of their neighbors that they would be reporting even the slightest oddity? We already have a deep trust issue in America as it is between citizens and the government. Imagine no trust at all between citizens?
Following this logic, every language is Perl with a bit of this or that. Perl was one of the first of the kind, but people saw obvious problems with it and so they innovated with 'little nicer syntax' or 'little better object system'. You might not want any of this, but you can't deny most people are happier with Python or Ruby.
I was taught that if the title of an article or story asks a question, the answer is almost always, "No."
> Anyway, I'm not sure why you are so defensive. Yes, Java will ship with some kind of lambdas, but they will be inferior to pretty much anything out there in terms of usability, readability, maintainability, performance and will be a major pain point when evolving the language in the future. Why not just accept it and move on?

Because it's not true. I don't know if you've seen the lambda performance benchmarks but they're pretty darn good. I don't know what you mean by "usability" but some uses of lambdas in other languages are not a right fit for the Java philosophy. When it comes to maintainability, lambdas are great. Method handles don't enforce any particular implementation strategy, and the current language does not even preclude introducing function types in the future if it proves to be as big a pain point as you claim; OTOH, introducing function types now would have made it pretty much impossible to go back.

Now, let me be clear: I am not saying Java is the best language out there (I don't think such a thing exists). I am not even saying it's the best language for the specific goals it took upon itself. All I'm saying is that given its unbelievably huge adoption, backwards compatibility and philosophy, its maintainers are doing a pretty good job.
That assumption is an oversimplification, concealing myriad dependencies, power/negotiating imbalances, information asymmetry, imperfect markets, lack of choice, restricted individual freedom, etc.
Both can be true at once. The richest are farther ahead than the richest were, in monetary terms, but the poor have made huge strides in absolute wealth as well: it's possible to live a 1950s upper middle class lifestyle on almost the same dollar amount in 2013. Our idea of what a middle-class lifestyle entails, though, is now far above that.
NSA must be thrilled. Like the TSA, the mainstream public has become completely complacent.

Bet they were worried for a whole minute there.

I won't be surprised if like Homeland Security Theater their funding will increase and not decrease after the exposure.

Well at least gitmo was closed. Oh wait. Guess we accomplished less than nothing.
It's growing for most people in the world. The exceptions would probably be those who live in areas that are experiencing war or failed governments.

I don't have time to dig up sources but it's not hard to research. Wikipedia is a good place to start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_reduction
But... if your data is hierarchical in nature, then trying stuff it into a relational database results in a giant clusterfuck.

Just use the right tool for the job.
Internet Marketing Consultant
also RgbQuant :)

demo: http://o-0.me/RgbQuant/

repo: https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js
Wow nice! Didn't realise this had been posted to HN, if you have any questions about how it works (although I have made a pretty descriptive readme.md) then just ask!

It was alot of fun making it!
5 top Linux and open source stories in 2013
I did too, first thing I thought when I saw this.
So what then does 13=king get me over king=king? And does forgetting to privatise implementation details suggest that the necessary language idioms make the data structure complex in a way that is orthogonal to the real world complexity of the objects it represents, and wasn't the opportunity to avoid that complexity the advantage suggested by the author. To put it another way, private and sealed and trait don't reflect characteristics of a deck of playing cards. They are overhead from the language. It is a case where a static type system, because it is biased toward it's and strings and objects, makes it more difficult to reason about our code - leaving jokers aside, how much of the Scala code makes sense if I want to play Pinnocle versus the data approach advanced by the author? Now I'll admit that Lisp has shaped the way I see the two approaches to representing cards. and this may be why I see implementation of jokers and pinnocle as easy extensions of lists and rather more complex under an object system with static type checking. But I will point out that this model got me to thinking about card games rather than card data types pretty quickly, and card games are probably the reason we're draining the swamp.
LIDAR for your smartphone
I disagree entirely. The genius behind the the US Constitution was its acceptance of the idea that power, no matter how just, will eventually corrupt, which is why our freedoms were supposed to be rather absolute. I think there are almost no sane reasons to infringe on a basic human right in general: the burden of proof should be on the government to do it selectively, and even then it should be treated with great scepticism.

Further, we have almost no power as a representative "democracy": the public can't recall a representative at all, for example, and it is only done by an internal chamber discussion (it has happened very few times in the history of the US).

Thus, we're really not supposed to "vote away" basic, sane axioms in the first place. The point of the US was to have those rights held firmly in place, and for its citizenry to use their right to bear arms to protect themselves against a government that tried to take them away. It's indicative of the US's culture at this point that stating this position (which is easily backed up by many of the founding fathers' writing) brands you as a "libertarian wingnut" or "on the fringe." Am I advocating violent revolt now? No, because most would not actually know what to revolt against (and probably don't perceive the corporate/government power structure in place in the US).

Then again, any attempt to do the aforementioned has failed in this country. A great example are the Alien and Sedition acts, which were passed conveniently around the time of the French Revolution.
Cryptolocker ransomware has 'infected about 250,000 PCs'
The same thing could have been said about visual basic... one of the worse language ever made.
Such a future would be yet another example of the institutionalization of racism just like the war on drugs. Imagine the day when you have to think to yourself "will friending this person reduce my credit rating?"
No pre ww2 research had proved in a number of places that a weapon smaller intermediate cartridge around 7mm was better that the traditional bulky long ranged rifle caliber weapons the SMLE for example - especially for non professional army with little training.

The AK was just good implementation of the concept and influenced by the German STG 44 and the use of SMG's like the PPSh-41 by Soviet forces.

the UK post Ww2 tried to move to this with the EM-2 .280 but was stymied by the USA's instance on retaining the macho full power rifle cartridge.
If I understand that scala code correctly it's just enumerating a multiple arity function manually. It's not that uncommon to see that in clojure for performance reaasons, clojure.core has plenty of examples as does the java-written compiler. It's a lot faster to enumerate the common arities than to use apply like:

(defn f [& args]
(apply g args))

And it usually just takes a couple of strokes in any decent text editor anyway.
I chuckled when we had the president of the United States of America announcing software delays on national television.
> First off, popularity of a language shouldn't be as important as you seem to make it in starting a project.

I think there is a minimum threshold to this. I support a large application written in an extremely obscure language (it's basically me and 5 other people on an old yahoo mailing list that make up the entire community). It is terrible. No unit testing frameworks, no http framework for rest calls, no decent UI templating, and on and on. 100% of functionality that I need comes in the form of calls to command line tools.

Obviously, Ruby is way past that threshold, so I do not disagree with what you said at all, but just wanted to point out there is a limit. I would not write a new commercial application in any language today that did not already have strong package system. As one person, you can write a few essential modules that you need, but you cannot write all of them.
TIOBE index for December 2013 says otherwise:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Ruby dropped 3 spots from this time last year (currently #13); if it is dying, it's dying slowly.

For my work on the JVM, Scala in comparison is way down at spot #31; Groovy #47, and Clojure doesn't even break the top 50.

Meanwhile F# is kicking some serious azz, soaring 27 spots in a single year to #20, impressive.

Ruby should be just fine for the next several years, assume will drop down into the 20s as the static typing + FP movement takes root in the enterprise.

2014 should be a fun year for the JVM: Java 8, Scala 2.11, a possible Kotlin release, and whatever Groovy and Clojure have planned.
Santa granted Canadian citizenship
"School children and grandparents alike are now worrying about whether their passwords are being passed in the clear now. Imagine that."

Even if they are "worrying" (and I really doubt that they are actually) they would only be worrying the same way they do about flying right after a major plane accident. That anxiety tends to go away very quickly.
It almost seems like the system was designed to be used in a political manner.
Interesting thought, I can imagine an ad campaign on Facebook targeting marijuana growers, and then the government using the profile information of those that click through to investigate them.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown had already issued an apology in 2009.
Hay Day Cheats & Hack Tool
sans "programming" http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python%2C%20ruby%2C%2...
By this measure, C, or C++, or Ruby must be dead, since I've not seen any new code written in it during my 13 years in the industry.

That said, I suspect there are fewer people picking up Perl for the first time for a project these days. My experience with it has always been driven by some degree of "legacy"--someone on the team has experience with the language, and has leveraged CPAN to solve problems. Perl is still my go-to "glue" and tooling language, but that's just because what I know. Would Ruby work? Yeah, probably, but I've not found it to be worth it to learn that language yet.
Yup!

Yet it helped millions achieve their goals. :)
The inside of the microwave 
Panoramic view. Feel it!
Way too little, way too late.
After all the years writing on computer, back to learning cursive writing again
Edward Snowden to deliver alternative Christmas message in the UK
Why should they arrest you when they can destroy you economically?
> This assumes that wealth is a zero-sum game, so it can be traded around but not created.

And you assume that because it's not always zero-sum, that it never is, a position just as fallacious.
Mirah has almost zero usage, and it seems very little development is going on there. I'm on the Mirah google group and there have been 5 posts since October.

I love the idea, but it seems few are interested....
Obligatory http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

I spent many years doing PHP. I am very glad that those years are behind me. Even if you allow for it being easy to setup - which is debatable - setup only happens once and is not very hard in any language. If you find it hard to install a programming language by following instructions, you are an amateur pretty much by definition.
Author here. I wrote this article as a guestblogger for Acquia, which is the company behind Drupal. I don't work at Acquia.

The article obviously uses Drupal as an example, PHPBB and Wordpress as comparison because they are all in the off-the-shelf, customizable category of PHP applications.

Both Drupal and phpBB (contrast to Wordpress) have massively modernized their code bases in the last years and improved the quality of their code. Coming from their original level, this is obviously a huge undertaking and still far away from being "high quality code" as an absolute measure. However their efforts in this space are remarkable.

Given that they have so huge installed code-basis that they have to take backwards compatibility seriously (which is also something that contributes to quality of software), explaining why it takes so long to improve the quality of truly old legacy software.

Compare this with many companies that use PHP, that still don't know what automated testing and quality assurance is. The article tries to highlight how PHP open source software use tools for quality assurance, what tools exist and that you should use them in your PHP projects.
Yes.

It wasn't just a matter of one "back door" but a matter of knowing that (1) people usually use codes incorrectly or screw up the key management and (2) if you give them a little help the key management will always be screwed up.
You've been in a reddit AMA with a 103 year old BAMF, haven't you?
> Ruby is a general purpose programming language

I question that. Ruby is very slow, dynamically typed and suffers from scaling challenges because of its multithreading support.

I think Ruby is increasingly falling into a niche: prototyping. Get a prototype up and running in a few weeks and once the proof of concept is established, switch to a statically typed language on the JVM.
Well, since the DoE study in 81, the only active project is one between China and India announced in 2012. Solar cell costs have come down 100X since the 70's, so in that sense its getting some attention. But since power is still so cheap, its hard to pay back the lift costs of any space-based installation that's been designed.
They are roughly at the same level of google trend popularity if you use just language names (w/o 'programming'):

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=python,ruby&cmpt=q

EDIT: This one is maybe more accurate (w/ 'programming' as selected category) and it shows that interest is roughly the same on average:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#cat=0-5-31&q=python,+ru...
I have not handwritten a single paragraph in the past 10 years.
I doubt that we would need to make human driving illegal. More likely automated cars become so popular and cheap that a generation grows up without learning how to drive manually and outside of a subset of enthusiasts human driven cars simply start to disappear from the market.

We already have driving assistance systems like ABS and computers which will automatically apply brakes which can reduce the risk of accidents but we don't mandate that all vehicles on the road use them.
Anything that is done by a public official at that level (not just the President) is well thought out and implemented after much discussion to achieve a particular goal. You can reverse engineer it and draw your conclusions as to why they said what they said.

In this case my interpretation is that it's to shift the blame a bit and also to appear to be out in front of the issue and let people know that "things are being handled help is on the way and we're on it".

An analogy I would use is this.

Let's say you are hosted somewhere (say Rackspace or AWS) and you lose connectivity and your site is down.

Better for RS or AWS to "appear to be on top of it" (whether they are or not) and to be "doing something" than to have this black box of "hey exactly what is going on and when will it be fixed". The anxiety is what kills you.

Once you know that at least (using another example) "a spare airplane is on the way but it is currently delayed by a snow storm that should clear in 2 hours" you are feeling much better than if you don't have any answers at all.
Say something nice, get something nice
So, here’s the deal.

To get this cheery Christmas spirit spread the internets, we need your help.

Write something nice to somebody and in return, you will get something nice back.

Sounds good? Great. Let’s make this the nicest website ever.
Oh, and a guy got arrested yesterday when he waved a gun around trying to steal a pair of gloves from a local farm store. Since its -14 degrees F this morning, I have some sympathy for the poor guy.