skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't play using Safari 7.0.1 on OS X 10.9.1. (And by "can't play", I mean I see the "CodeCombat requires a modern browser to play" screen.)

User agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_1) AppleWebKit/537.73.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.1 Safari/537.73.11
I'm most bullish on bitcoin when I read articles such as this one, and most skeptical when I read the thoughts of the bitcoin believers. It's truly the most interesting technological development in years, if only because it reveals how little anyone really understands money or economics.

Here's another interesting (though imperfect) way of thinking about bitcoin: it's a decentralized corporation, where bitcoins are ownership shares and the business is money transfer, like a decentralized Western Union. And for further thought, could other types of businesses also be structured in this way?
WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) was coined in 1980[1], though Xerox PARC was likely referring to them as "windows" even before that.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
I believe that unmanaged (fire-and-forget type) store of value is a fiction to begin with. Most if not all thing depreciate in time for wear and tear or plain obsolence. Managed assets such as a business you're controlling or your own set of talents and skills can appreciate over time. Scarce assets such as gold or real estate appreciate, however not due to their inherent value, but only due to the "greater fool" dynamic; it's unstable, and unpredictably so.

So what we have is governemnt creating an illusion of unmanaged store of value through financial engineering. It's is somewhat artificial, so I suspect it's not stable either. Consider that financial bubbles are caused by excess of capital relative to production needs, and the glut of capital was accumulated strictly due to people trying to preserve value of their savings. There is a mismatch between amount of value people are trying to preserve and cumulative size of viable investment opportunities.
> Who knows how finely tuned these projects were or what their load was like before a rewrite. A rewrite in a new language gives you more benefits than just the new language , it also gives you the benefit of hindsight. The ability to fix mistakes made in the first implementation can go a long way.

That's a very good point with these rewrite stories - you could happen to rewrite some really poor code while porting and boom! Language Y is 50% more performant!
Yes that was an issue with the old WebRequest classes, but now with System.Net.Http the situation is much better (though they did what most people end up doing and wrapping WebRequest in a sensible manner)
This idea is excellent. We have several schools that would be perfect for that, and a number of execs we'll be contacting. Thank you!
Yes, I took the fact that this was not a global modification of a widely used data type as a given, since to do so would be crazy in any language.

And sure, you can always look up in the type system or (in a less well typed language) the documentation to see what it does. The point of writing clear code is that doing so should be a last resort and not something you force on developers in order to understand what's going on.

Readability is what we're talking about here, and TimeChange.days(2) or new TimeChange(2, Days) are both more readable options than 2.days() because a programmer knows what is happening without querying information that isn't written in front of them.
These are all mostly separate issues than teaching black girls to code. Why do you think they must be conflated and tackled at the same time? There is a benefit to tailoring solutions to different problems. There is nothing contradictory about being for all the things you mentioned while also encouraging specifically black girls to experiment with coding.
> Assuming the interest rates are the same, I'd agree. Would they be?

I doubt they'd be the same in either nominal or real terms. But that's a side issue.

You could already do what you're talking about with gold. A bank could offer gold savings accounts that pay interest on gold loans. They don't do it. Borrowers are deflation-averse and no one wants to deal with the exchange rate fluctuations.

BTC has some legit uses (like buying unjustly banned consciousness-expanding products over the internets) but the built-in deflationary death spiral in its design pretty much ensures that it will never be a serious full-spectrum parallel currency, much less a replacement for the dollar and euro.
I've run a few adverts on Reddit and the returns were far better than Adsense, we got a lot of long-time customers through Reddit and plenty of clicks.

I really like the fact you can comment on the adverts as if they were a post, this lets people discuss (and hopefully praise) your company.
So you have one decent example where such a change didnt really alter the quality of the site, yet that doesnt magically apply to every scenario.
Here's a US architect that I think is more realistic towards downsizing:
http://rosschapin.com/Plans/plans.html
I would agree with you sjs. If your product is crappy then marketing can't do anything. I tried lot of laptop but none of them worked like macbookpro. I have tried lot of phones but none of them worked like iPhone.
Exactly. Bitcoin is the first autonomous corporation.
Zen room for Vim: Focsuing only on the essential
What's the carbon footprint of an elected government creating more money?
How does the volatility of BTC make it desirable for merchants to accept it? Either they hold BTC and are exposed to the volatility, or they convert to a fiat currency and are exposed to some transaction fees.

Perhaps the transaction fees turn out to be lower than those for credit cards, in which case BitCoin maybe becomes an alternative payment network.
So someday we might see the secret service enforcing rules about how much computing capacity any one entity can control; to prevent collusion attacks on widely used cryptographic ledger systems?
> It is deplorable that he used the word "evil" to describe Bitcoin.

Krugman is clearly an intelligent man, but in his public writing he has a habit of declaring things he doesn't like as "evil."

Given we know he's not stupid, I assume it's to increase the attention he receives. Based on the re-shares from my left-of-center friends, it tends to work.
The early source code files from the screen shots are a reminder that big things start small; very small.
Please use some restraint! Sometimes an exception is not the answer!

I've had... I think it was Windows::UI::Input::PointerPoint::GetCurrentPoint throw exceptions if the finger passed in was no longer touching the screen. Sounds fine at first, right? Except...

1) This occurred before "finger released" events, so you'd run into a crash because they thought throwing an exception was better than returning the last known finger position, which would've rightly left me with no error report.

2) This occurred in a nasty rare corner case, making figuring out the reproduction a PITA. I don't think I'm alone in not expecting such a simple function to throw when given a known-to-me-valid fingerId. Worse, the exception was completely undocumented on MSDN -- either explicitly or as a hint from function signature (at least Win32 had the common decency to return BOOL or HRESULT.)

3) I found no method for validating a finger ID, so one had to simply catch the exception and accept the massive framerate dip of exception handling overhead if the user pawed at the screen. Before you mistake that for hyperbolic performance concerns: I could make a smooth 30fps tank to bellow 10fps consistently. I measured!

Touch input isn't the only unexpected thing throwing exceptions for WinRT. The end result of this "throw exceptions whenever you can" mentality is I've been forced to build a habit of wrapping every WinRT API call in extremely wide try/catch blocks to log whatever random undocumented exceptions come crawling out of it. By becoming the rule, it took the "exception" out of "exceptions". I'm sure you'll agree: This is horrifically ugly, slow, and in generally poor taste.

But it's necessary. The other alternative is you hopefully find as many as 90% of the weird junk that crashes your program with exceptions, most of which you don't actually care about in the slightest -- and the other 10% avoid discovery and instead explode your stuff in production, most of which will be for no good reason.
I read it a few years ago and found it quite helpful, too – the most important bit being that (most) people like to talk about themselves.
This seems pretty incredible that CodeCombat has already reached the point where they're placing people into jobs. It's supposed to be Codecademy's goal [1] to do that eventually but they've been around much longer.

1. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/codecademy-offers-f...
Care to elaborate? Fan of Robert Greene's work (his Interviews With Masters is free on kindle for a bit: http://www.amazon.com/Interviews-Masters-Companion-Greenes-M...)
Hi Benji,
there is a way to avoid CGlib proxy for what you want to do.
It's clearly a hack but I think it's a better hack than using CGlib because it doesn't require code generation.

By default, a method reference or a lambda doesn't carry a reflective description of itself to be lightweight. This description is generated by the compiler, pass to the metafactory but once the method reference object is created the recipe of the method reference is lost.
That is true but in one case, if the lambda or the method reference is Serializable, in that case, the recipe need to be kept in order that the runtime can deserialize the method reference.
There are several ways to force a method reference to be serializable, the easiest way is to declare the functional interface that will receive the method reference as inheriting from Serializable.
This means you can not use java.util.function.Function, you have to create your own interface that inherits from Serializable.
Once you have done that, you just have to serialize the method reference to an array and deserialize it by hand to extract the recipe.
So the only thing you need is a code that simulate de-serialization withtout using the classical ObjectInputStream of Java because it will not let you sneak at the recipe. The code here [1], do what you want.

cheers,

[1] https://github.com/forax/jayspec/blob/master/jayspec/src/com...
You're assuming that reserve currency holdings are stores of value. I'm not sure I buy that assumption, since central banks use those reserves to manipulate the monetary system in a number of ways, not to store value. Also, as far as I can tell, the total amounts in these holdings are small compared to the total amounts held in stocks, real estate, gold, and other non-monetary stores of value.
Perhaps you are right that I am painting HN with too broad a brush. I do see some good points made scatteringly in this discussion, such as yours.

On Rust, and also this project (I believe the following point is mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well): There's one thing I don't get about the whole thing. People who want a low-level language with lots of control have C and C++. People who want a high-level language with GC etc. have lots of options today as well. So, why Rust, and why this MS project? C and C++ have faults but the people who care about them are well aware; if nothing else they are a known quantity. People who don't care about any of this will just pick the higher-level stuff.

I guess I'll have to try one of these languages out to form a better opinion.
did someone say WebP? :)
90210 to see products.

I like it. I want the herb garden. But I want to know exactly what herbs I am getting. Or is that information already on your site?
But tech jobs in general don't expect you to have been doing it since early teens.

You can perfectly get a job in some Big Co. even if you only started programming in college.

But startups in general (and in this case, YC) all want to hire the top 1%, so isn't it natural they are biased at the people with the most experience, because they believe that they are better (which is not necessarily true)?
I've never agreed much with Krugman's theories, but at least he understands a thing or two about economy. However, what I've always found him to be always clueless about is - technology. You have a better chance finding a more insightful tech article from a random tech blogger than from Krugman. He always misses the point. Without exception. I don't know even why he keeps doing this to himself. He just ends up embarrassing himself.

How can Bitcoin, a technology, that has shown so much promise, in many other ways besides being "money" (which some still disagree it is), be "evil"?

Also, as someone else has mentioned, he says FIAT money is backed by men with fun, and Bitcoin by "nothing" (another point where he shows just how little he understands technology in general), yet Bitcoin is the "evil" one?
There are reddit admins who poison reddit ads, because they can freely place ads on subreddits without cost. It's annoying.

The reddit ads system could be far better and without the corruption. It does cost more and is less effective than Facebook ads even for very specific subreddits, and it costs a ton more than it's worth even when there is no one else buying ad space in a subreddit.

Correct me if I'm wrong if this has changed.
Does the word racist make you uneasy? Maybe you should embrace your position instead of misrepresenting mine.
I'd suggest that Imgur will be a nearly complete replacement option for Reddit (no coincidence, it's intentional). At the rate Imgur is increasing in size, and the rate at which they're moving toward social, this is seemingly just a matter of time now.
Done.

https://github.com/Imdsm/AutoGfy
This is why I hate Hacker News.
Google Holiday Express
How The Content Industry Almost Killed Blockbuster
I originally misread the source as 'wired.com'
It's not as far as you think it is :)
see https://bitbucket.org/jpilliet/android-292
I know I personally avoid monitoring by storing my assets in trusts with formal equity in foreign (I'm in Canada) LLC's that manage said assets. Myself, I own no property, I'm legally homeless [1], and one of my LLC's gets a tax credit for owning a homeless shelter. I strongly argue to anyone around me that If you owe taxes, you should pay them. I don't tell them that you can avoid owing taxes, and it's not considered tax evasion.

Bitcoin makes a lot of this even more complex, and as more people start using/trusting it for larger transactions, it'll be quite difficult to know who actually owns what. I might not even need half my loopholes anymore.

1. just like this guy: http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/05/19/the-homeless-billiona...
Sorry about that. The fix is deploying right now.
I dislike all these 'expressive' or how abstract rust as a language can be from what it's trying to achieve which is to be a 'systems programming language' on par with c (c++ is not the same as c). Show the resulting assembly for both a C version and a Rust version, now map both the rust version and c version to the resulting assembly.
Extension methods are a godsent in C#. Really allow you to write extremely expressive code.

I cannot agree enough. This is not new for any C# dev.

Expressiveness is not as great as ruby, but certainly on par with Rust

LINQ extension methods by Jon Skeet - https://code.google.com/p/morelinq/

I would recommend reading this stackoverflow post to see some great extension methods.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/271398/what-are-your-favo...
Oxford-style dress shirts do not require ironing. They can be bought at most men's stores (e.g., Uniqlo, Bonobos, J. Crew).

Also of note: The person interviewed in the story is female, not male.
An embarrassing amount of Civ 5. Part of it has to do with a fascination with watching a crude simulation of the human epic unfold. The other part has to do with the enjoyment derived from nuking my opponents. It's a pretty awkward mix.

A distant runner up is Starbound, followed next by a miscellaneous assortment of games such as Darwinia, Bastion, Game Dev Tycoon, and Minecraft in certain spurts.
"Types and Programming Languages" by Benjamin C. Pierce
"Principles of Program Analysis" by Nielson, Nielson, Hankin
Ok, but I think the point is clear. USD has value because U.S. government said so and people trust that government, and Bitcoin has value because some people trust the Bitcoin network as the "currency issuer".

If we imagine a scenario, where a majority of businesses will accept bitcoins, and people will be able to buy bitcoins and use either dollars or btc for payments, and both methods will be legal, we will see that dollar doesn't have any more "intrinsic value" (whatever that means) as bitcoin. It will be just two competing payment systems with different attributes.
> suggest it is doomed for failure

Wait, I think we are missing his point. Last sentence of the article:

"So let’s talk both about whether BitCoin is a bubble and whether it’s a good thing — in part to make sure that we don’t confuse these questions with each other."

I think this article does not go into the 'will it work?' debate. It alerts us instead to another debate, 'to what degree do we want it?'

It is an addition to what Charlie Stross was saying. He is just adding "guys, why are your comments replying to a different question?"

At least, I think that is the discussion he wants to start. But his talk about the ceiling and floor in value in the middle of the article actually belongs to the OTHER discussion, the one he does not want to start but spends half of the text going into.

It is like trying to talk about empirics to consider for deciding national policy, while everyone is shouting their usual political opinions.
US Government taxes certainly do support the US Dollar's value, but that support was more vital at the creation of the currency than it is today. Today's value is secured by the many merchants who trade in the dollar at fairly predictable prices.

Iran comes to mind as a merchant who could make a similar commitment to a cryptocurrency. What if you could suddenly buy oil at BTC X per barrel? This could establish enough of a link between BTC and a high-volume commodity that it could create some stable value, and might appeal ideologically to a class of economic actors that are already somewhat motivated to avoid trade in dollars and euros.
I'm not a libertarian. I am using the correct terms that apply to those policies. I don't think of the phrase "welfare state" as pejorative, nor was it originally intended to be so. A combination of redistributionist tax code and generous healthcare/education/benefits are working out really well for Scandinavia right now, and in my opinion we could learn quite a bit from what we're seeing in those countries.

In my experience, strong libertarians prefer to avoid even mentioning that the poor exist.
How does it handle operations more complex than "select * from user"? For example, joins and subqueries. And wouldn't it be nicer to have the database layer figure out properties for you instead of writing mapping code by hand?

For example (this uses SQL, I am not big on ORMs):

User user = database.queryForObject("SELECT * FROM user WHERE user_id=?", User.class, userId);
Well, please, lets. Is it bad? No, it is not. It's meant to expose and encourage some kids who, statistically, are otherwise unlikely to be exposed to computer programming in the same way that other kids have been by providing a comfortable environment filled with others like them.

I suspect, however, since there's more comments than upvotes here, that a significant amount of Hacker News readers have a problem with that. I read comments like, 'oh, they should allow kids of all colors and sexes in there', and I think to myself, are you really so blind to the reality that the kids in this highly underrepresented demographic would be crowded out by other kids who already have the privilege of and exposure to computer programming.

No one is trying to prevent anyone from being programmers with Black Girls Code. They're just trying to create some comfortable space for these kids so that they can grow their computer skills as they grow up and become tech-literate adults in our ever-increasing information economy and culture that can compete on a fair playing field. That so many people here have a problem with that is highly concerning.
Yesterday my Intel SSD 320 failed horrible and kills all data on my RAID system. I still do not understand how it happened. I was sure my storage system is very safe.

My system was configured as a mirror RAID with two 1TB HDDs. The RAID was created with Intel Rapid Storage technology (my motherboard is Asus p8z77v-pro). The failed SSD was used as a RAID cache configured with Intel Smart Response technology.

I was wary to use SSD directly as a main system drive, because I heard of "BAD_CTX 13F" error which happened with Intel 320 drives. My hope was that if SSD is used as just a cache, then in the case of SSD failure the data still be safe. Since this error reportedly occurs during power outage only, I set up an UPS. But all these precautions have not helped.

Yesterday I surfed web with Google Chrome, and my computer suddenly become unresponsive. At first only Chrome was unusually slow, and other open programs work normally, but in a few minutes the computer was totally freeze. I was forced to press reset, and upon restart Windows automatically entered into non-interruptible "recovery mode". After more then 24 hours the OS reported that "further recovery is impossible" and the RAID become unbootable. The SSD serial number was changed to "BAD_CTX 0000013F", the sign of famous "8mb bug". It is interesting that in my case this bug was not caused by any power outage except when I pressed "reset" button, but I don't think this is count as a power loss.

I take an HDD out of the RAID to connect it to other computer and save critical data, but without any success. At first sight all file system looks correct, and I even manage to copy all recent data files, but when I looked into those files it was total mess. Each file consist of some arbitrary chunks of unrelated files, mixed in random order - a bit of some executable file, several lines of my project source code, followed by chunk of some unknown xml configuration file, followed by random bytes, etc. A total mess.

I still don't understand the reason of such spectacular data corruption. I have three hypotheses:
1. SSD cache sent incorrect data to RAID on write (two month ago I switched SSD cache from "enhanced" to "maximized" mode, in which writes initially goes to SSD and only then to the RAID disks).
2. Intel RAID controller goes crazy due to a program error.
3. Windows corrupt data during non-interruptible "recovery" phase.

The moral is, even Intel SSD with UPS is not safe, and mirror RAID cannot not protect data from such errors.
There's a pretty big difference in audience in these two examples. Codecademy is targeting people who have no, or nearly no, experience programming and trying to turn them into programmers. CodeCombat's normal stuff appears to be in the same vein, but this specific challenge is something only a fairly experienced programmer is likely to solve. It's easy to place great programmers. Not so easy to take someone, make them a good programmer, and then get them a job.
OSX has built-in NLP tools? I tried doing a google search for it, but I can't find any documentation. Do any of you know anything about it?
writes go to the HDD and are then pulled into the SSD for fast reads.

With journalling?

Also, I believe you could also achieve this at a software level with ZFS, which I understand allows you to do things like allocate an entire SSD (or multiple SSDs) as caches for other (presumably slower) drives.

Careful reading, please. Journalling combined with the high throughput of spinning platters if you can create situations that eliminate seek and rotational latency is the key point here, not caching.