skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you have pointers, they sometimes have to start the life uninitialized (i.e. with a value of 0) hence nil pointers.

Maybe at the machine level. But there's nothing that stops a programming language a few levels above machine from requiring that every pointer be initialized with a reference.

> As you admit yourself, the proposed solutions don't actually get rid of anything. At best they can force you to handle nil value by wrapping it in some wrapper.

The entire point is that a large majority of APIs don't WANT to accept or handle NIL, but have to, because the default is to allow it. And in some languages, such as Java, the only way to extend the type system is with reference types, making it impossible to ever not have to handle NIL. By reversing this decision, it becomes possible to specify both allowance and disallowance of NIL-valued parameters. Why you would ever argue against such expression is beyond me.
Random Email Game
I think it fails for:
findregex(set(['abc']), set(['abcd']))
I actually looked for a twitter account, but didn't know which would be official. Then jgrahamc retweeted hnstatus and I knew which to follow.
Do we get the karma we lost refunded somehow? I am certain I am missing around 30 points.
But this is probably why they did it :)
When the CNC mills from Toshiba made it to the Soviet Union in the 1980's, it had a significant impact on submarine warfare:

http://www.auilr.org/pdf/4/4-1-8.pdf
THE TOSHIBA-KONGSBERG INCIDENT (pdf)
Nimrod is a gem. Just needs a big company to host release parties and sponsor it.

I am convinced, a good part of Go's popularity is Google. As a language it is ok. Has good stuff in it. Quite often the argument for adoption is "Google is behind it, and it is becoming really popular". Which, is not completely irrational -- it is nice to have a large company throwing away perhaps years of quality full-time dev work at a language.
It sounds like Amex is trying to file a patent for our service (and many others). What does HN think we should do?

US Patent 20140006297 filed on July 2, 2013 (from link above):

An integrated, end-to-end, automated system that
enables a first social networking user to seamlessly
transfer value to a second social networking user, even if
the second user is not registered with the money transfer
service from which the first user initiates the transfer...

Our service:

PikaPay.com : https://www.PikaPay.com/

Send Bitcoins to anyone on Twitter, as easy as a Tweet!

PikaPay is a Bitcoin wallet integrated with the Twitter API and is one of the fastest and easiest ways to use Bitcoin. Just like in the Amex patent, with PikaPay the recipient doesn't need to have a PikaPay account to receive bitcoins.

We were the first to start sending bitcoins on Twitter back in 2011. But we're sure that scores of other companies have been doing "value transfer via social networks" even earlier.

Do we have to take the Amex patent application seriously in any way, and is there anything specific we should do?

We Tweeted AmEx about it recently:

https://twitter.com/PikaPay/status/420231417117683713

We're curious about what others here think about the patent and how they would approach this issue.
It's interesting how history repeats itself. This is the story of how we ended up with the FISA court. The lesson for us is that need to be careful that whatever reforms we make to fix the NSA won't be used in even worse ways in the future.
Some of it is also the fault of the compilers for being too explicit in their default error messages. You get that horrible output because string is really a typedef to "basic_string<char>" and basic_string takes two more template arguments with defaults. But why is the compiler resolving the typedef in the error message by default? At least let it be "std::map<std::string, std::string, std::less<std::string>, std::allocator<std::pair<std::string const, std::string> > >" instead of that inscrutable noise.

And if you really need to provide the information that "std::string" is "std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >" then put it on a separate line in the output, once, instead of repeating it internally within every recursive template instantiation.
Senators introduce bill to prevent state from helping NSA mass surveillance
I agree...makes it feel like a "sea of text" and difficult to parse.
Idaho (remote or on-site)

KickBack Rewards Systems
http://www.kickbacksystems.com
http://careers.kickbacksystems.com

I'm a senior manager at KRS. We're a bootstrapped and profitable start-up. We're building a nation-wide coalition loyalty program and already have thousands of clients and thousands of locations on the program. Our clients include a half-dozen Fortune 50 companies - one that is an anchor partner in our coalition loyalty program. As the Director of Software Development I need some help! You will be joining a medium sized team of 11 developers. If you are interested in any of these positions my contact information is under my profile.

Data Scientist

We are looking for a world-class data scientist to get in to the minds of our customers. Your job will be to analyze our "large" data-sets, identify patterns, determine consumer sentiment and provide them with incredible offer. Looking for someone with extensive programming and modeling experience using the Hadoop ecosystem. At KickBack you will research and implement new scalable learning algorithms and data mining techniques including sequential data models, variable discretization, feature extraction, selection, and construction. Machine learning a plus. We're looking for an expert someone we would consider a "game changer" and are paying accordingly.

Back-end Developer

We're looking for a pro that can create scalable back-ends. Message queues, concurrency and fault tolerance should be second-nature to you.

Front-end Developer

We're looking for an expert in Angular whom can pair with our aforementioned world-class back-end developer. Heck, if you aren't an angular pro, anyone with amazing front-end skills will do, you can pick-up our framework or suggest a better one as you work in to the role. UX skills a plus. Like any start-up, we're big on usability.

Mobile Developer

We're looking for two mobile developers. We have a specific vision for our mobile platform and have already moved past html5 interfaces to native applications to improve performance.

DevOps

(Multiple positions) We're looking for a Hadoop cluster administrator, a security operations manager and an overall DevOps engineer proficient in Chef, Celery, Message Queues, Networking, BGP AnyCast, etc. We'll always train the right candidate so junior developers and candidates fresh out of a university are welcome to apply.

Thanks!
> What's odd is that if you look at your submission history, you can up vote your own submissions.

It doesn't seem to do anything though.
Silicon City
Reminds me of a story from the other end of the skill ladder - as a student, I had a short-term job in a hosiery factory, ostensibly to help move a couple of very heavy machines around, with the rest of the time doing stockroom work. The Day came, the crane operator came along and told us to keep clear, and we didn't lay a finger on the machinery. Us hired meat just went back to the stockroom, fine by us.

Incidentally, if you're looking for easy stockroom work, a hosiery factory has no heavy lifting...
CloudFlare also takes of the load of your dead server if the server is dead. It still has a "Try the original server"-button, but that is more manual.
Homemade bread
Need Protein Kinase Inhibitors in Oncology Report
Yeah, that's too much. And that's just for the NY Times... how many other sites are you supposed to pay for?

I feel like there should be some technical way to handle letting a user pay a flat amount, and distribute the proceeds to the sites you actually visit, in a sort of fair way.
Stanford University: A Florence for the 21st century (The Economist blog)
In addition to having a prize for a CS major and a non-CS major, you could have one that is specifically for a new beginner to programming. Some students have been hacking since they were in junior high but have a different major. I started with a Commodore VIC-20 and BASIC but I wasn't a CS major in college.
Iran is in another corner of the installed workroom?
This is true. As a broke-ass college student, I would never have picked up my little WRT54 if it wasn't cheap. Leave it to Cisco to completely misunderstand the low end of the market...

As an aside, where are you finding Ubiquiti APs for under $50? Craigslist?
Google is also the one serving them, which does allow them to cheat.
Call me paranoid, but I am expecting a comeback of such things, considering this: http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/05/fbi_drops...
Interesting, I did not know that. Which GPS did you end up using?
What does recruting as a monetization strategy means? That is, what is recruting? Truly curious.
Multiple nil types in Go.
Ask HN: How many KP did you loose with the outage?
Isn't that a problem for Customs to worry about?
Why first-born children do better in school (parenting game theory)
It's true. I'd label it "indirect knowledge hoarding." But the excuses/reasons are usu. most people are busy or don't feel they'd make good teachers.

There has to be an incentive / prioritization by the person to do something about it. Also, some people don't even think they're experienced enough.

Maybe useful knowledge transfer via teaching or at least reviewing teaching material.
I'm intrigued that you have a person named Sugar working for you.
The respective power outputs of a hand crank and this soccer ball differ by 2-3 orders of magnitude. Not to mention, only one kid gets to take the soccer ball home and light their led with it...

This is a design experiment, not a practical solution.
Anyone knows the reason for the downtime ?
IMHO, sadly, that part is serving as a shibboleth.

The clue is how he explains all the simple parts of the script with comments, but leaves this part unexplained, making some of us feel left out of the cool club. Implying: if you don't grasp it immediately you must not be up to it.

Overall it's a great post, but as to the cryptic parts of it, it's disappointing to see this kind of thing on the part of someone we all look up to. It would be more generous of spirit if he were to have written this in a readable, self explanatory way, like the rest of the code... as python should be written.

Sigh. Norvig has a posse, but I thought it had to be said.

>>> import this
...
"Readability matters"
...
"Sparse is better than dense"
...
"If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea"
Yes, the halting problem can be solved for any programs which can only exist in a finite number of states, but most common definitions of a program would include things such turning machines, which can hold an infinite number of states. Really it comes down to the semantics and bounds of the problem.

However I think the most interesting result is mine :P
Why is Mtgox.com down?
Does anyone know why MTgox.com is down? How do you think this will affect the price?
It's also because it saves a ton of resources not having to serve crawler requests.
Yup. Supposedly Martin Luther King Jr.'s wife read the letter first, possibly at MLK's request.

This is why the NSA revelations are so scary. This kind of stuff has already been done, and the NSA could do it so much worse, to so many more people.
My dream of owning a reasonably affordable ADSL router (with support for custom firmwares) is never going to be fulfilled.
The Year of the Bitcoin
Bleh, the downtime killed my comment here and I'm too lazy/tired to redo it.

Can you tell more about Distributism that isn't on the Wikipedia page? I'll look it up more, but I've never heard of it before.
Not the OP, but for some start-up resources on Android check out the following:

The Android Training Guide is not a bad place to start at: http://developer.android.com/training/index.html

That should give you a bit of idea of what android development entails.

More resources:

* Android Bootcamp Videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf7z_mrce00&list=SPE953C0B85B...

If you'd like a guided video walkthrough through android, this is an excellent source.

* Android Cookbook Book: http://androidcookbook.com/home.seam Has solutions to common problems. Also check out their code on Github: https://github.com/AndroidCook/Android-Cookbook-Examples

* BigNerd Ranch Android Book: A detailed reference on all about Android Development. http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/android_the_big_nerd_ranch_...

As always despite all these resource, I find that the best way to learn is to just get your hands dirty. Use the resource to get a sense of the Android development world and solidify that understanding by doing a small project like the one you described here.

Hope this helps a bit.
And because of the caching, it wasn't posted on the maintenance page at all if you visited before it was added. (I was seeing it on one machine and not the other).
what was that last part...except as allowed by law (approx.).....hmmmm, so by law one has the freedom of speech...so as long as there is not the contents of slander or fighting words in any utterance made by the fired employee, then it sounds like they got frazzled by some legal masturbation...the clause means nothing...
When I read 'subtitles', i wondered about the .srt files of the movies.
Yes, and that's if you can hear or feel it vibrate in your bag, which can be difficult, specially in crowded/noisy places.
Physically based wet surfaces
I think the main issue is that people ge excited about a topic and buy the book. They enjoy few chapters but soon they come across something more interesting on internet and then buy that book too. Almost all non-fiction has some boring bits which you just have to struggle through to reach interesting parts. Its in this struggle stage I find myself most vulnerable to start reading another book and leaving the current one. Do this for years and you end up having lots of unread books. I thought this is what OP was referring to.
But: http://play.golang.org/p/J46-8OEWYS
I wonder if Dell will rename the SonicWALL NSA series?
Xero and the precious petals of New Zealand funds mgmt
I gained, because people were unable to downvote me. More seriously, I took the weekend off from the internet so there was nothing to lose.
Joh Rivaaj Fashion Show 
Joh Rivaaj Fashion Show
But in particular to create a seed training set (for the neural network) -- not as a standalone house number recognition system.
I think these are both games named after the 'cards against humanity' which harbors no grand or good ambitions. Also available in a print your own version.

http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/
Must be the funny symbols.
That happens. When too many people register accounts they're locked for the rest of the day and the register account option is no longer there, only login.
Agree with Ned. I worked on an idea (two, even) before starting our current business and, although I learnt a lot from that experience, I don't think it was as much as I'd have learned spending time in a slightly larger, faster-moving, company.

I think the idea of getting real exposure sooner is underrated.

Incidentally, this is why your Startup Apprentice role is so interesting nedwin ;).
> I definitely want to keep it as local as possible and even have a few community members signed up.

You might gain some local sponsors by offering to put their company logo on your website. See the bottom of the page of http://clojure-conj.org for the Clojure Conj conference. There are "Platinum," "Gold," and "Supporting" sponsors listed.

Put a Sponsors page on your website and make it easy for businesses to sign up. You could even have a donate button.
Yes, I love expressions as this one:

winners, losers = (winners - losers), (losers - winners)
I doubt the umbilical moved the rocket. What you were seeing was probably the effect of wind -- it's a very tall, narrow structure with a big fairing on top. Once the clamp is released, it's only held down at the bottom, so like any tall building it flexes noticeably in the wind.
Is this the end or the start of the beginning?
From the article: "I started by finding a page that lists winners and losers of US presidential elections through 2004."
Snapchat hires lobbyist after breach
I bought a Pebble – thinking it'd be great to know who it was calling/texting me while I was riding my motorcycle, so I could decide whether to pull over and get my phone out of my pocket. It turns out that the answer is _always_ "No!". Now that I've had my Pebble for almost a year, I don't even look at it when I feel my phone ringing in my pocket while riding the bike.

It _has_ gotten me back in the habit of wearing a watch though, after something like 20 years of relying on a phone if I wanted to know the time I now feel like I'm "missing something" when I don't have it on my wrist.

(Turns out probably the most useful thing it does as a "smart watch" is being used as a replacement for the bicycle computer I lost - I now use Runkeeper running on my phone and the Pebble on my wrist to do the keeping track of speed/time/distance that I used to do with my ~$20 bike computer. Not a spectacularly successful outcome for a ~$130 toy…)
Belkin bought Linksys, so they're the ones to blame, not Cisco.

I'm wondering if there's still marketability in stackable form. Do they even have switches of compatible footprint? Although I always dreamed of the day I'd stack my router on a switch from the same line to create a beautiful networking statue on my desk, I always deferred to price and other features when making purchasing decisions.
I guess he meant having two separate logs. One for production, and secondary with his journal. In this case you could restore from backup the original data, and then replay rest of stuff from the external log. That's the solution I'm using with really important data where I cannot afford any data loss, even if down time is acceptable. On commit, it committed to two separate systems, but the secondary system is only journal which can be replayed.
Sure, the atoms don't care, but if large buyers demand commodities with a clean paper trail, that sends pricing signals that are likely to change behavior. What else would you suggest?
Ask HN: If iPad CPU is now "desktop class", why does the browser crash so much?
I have a new iPad Mini with Retina, and it amazes me how often the browser crashes. Also, when not crashing, it still has issues with far more websites than my laptop browser does (either in OSX or Win7)

Why is this the case?

I'm pretty sure the current iPad has a better CPU and likely more RAM than laptops had a few years ago, and yet laptop browsers were never as problematic as browsers on my iPad.

Laptop browsers work on more websites and are more stable. Why is this the case?
Growing Up Unvaccinated
Android app combines Wifi and Cellular on multiple devices
In 97.5% of case, the `nil` value of Go types follows the NullObject pattern.

There's really just nil pointers that are still equivalent to `null`, and their absence would be an abnormality, as there's no reason why a pointer couldn't have a nil representation.
This is so fantastic. The tools you've made really remind me of some of Bret Victor's ideas around the future of programming. I look forward to the day where I can play an MMO where my character progresses inline with my programming ability. You could program your own spells and weapons... Non destructive exploits and hacking would be encouraged rather than discouraged... that's the world I want to live in right now.
This is even more interesting.
I disagree with this. By that logic, 404 pages should also return 200, because the error page stating that the content couldn't be found was indeed rendered successfully.

The difference between your status.heroku.com example and this is that in the former case you are seeking to look at a page that tells you about their status, when in this case you were seeking HN's index but instead got a page about status - because there was a problem preventing you from getting what you wanted.
As others have pointed out, I'm not talking about nil as the zero-valued pointer at the hardware level. I'm talking about nil as the additional member of every type in the language's typesystem. A typesystem is an abstraction over the hardware, designed to catch programmer errors and facilitate communication among programmers. There's no reason it has to admit every possible value that the hardware can support.

And people are applying that sort of discipline - see the NullObject pattern in any OO language, or the @Nullable/@NotNull annotations in Java, or !Object types in Google Closure Compiler. The thing is, they have to apply it manually to every type, because the type system assumes the default is nullable. That makes it an inconvenience, which makes a number of programmers not bother.

I'll agree that null pointers are comparatively easy to track down compared to memory corruption caused by multi-threading. Threads are a broken programming model too, and if you want a sane life working with them you'll apply a higher-level abstraction like CSP, producer-consumer queues, SEDA, data-dependency graphs, or transactions on top of them.
Zappos gets rid of all managers
50 Problems In 50 Days: The Power Of Not Knowing
It's likely that if bitcoin hits some serious roadblocks and the protocol needs to change, an altcoin will have solved the problem and most people will switch.

For instance, the proof-of-stake coins (peercoin, novacoin) are far more resilient to these problems.

I'm curious if they can agree on, develop, and deploy a protocol change far enough in advance to prevent a mass exodus to another altcoin.
Okay, what I don't get, how could Valve get that many partners to offer Steam Machines? Seeing as how little games for Linux there currently are? Did Valve tell them something we don't know? Like, every major Engine Developer is about to offer an OpenGL option that would allow devs to continue to work just as they do now but the resulting binary could be created with OpenGL instead of DX?

I know that you can stream your Windows games through the Steam Box but come on. If I wanted to do that, I could already run an hdmi cable from my PC directly to my TV and don't need an extra box in between.
Ask HN: Should we degrade our product to get a first, major customer?
Hello everyone,

I'm here to share my frustration :)

Few weeks ago we met a CEO of a major company that had interest in our product.

He was really excited to work with us - up till the moment he heard we haven't developed an IOS version of our product yet.

The meeting ended when he said to us something like: "I'll be glad to work with you, but only when you have both Android and IOS versions."

So, after a short discussion we made a small pivot and started developing the product almost from scratch - with PhoneGap. (Not such a big deal since most of the logic reside on the server anyway).

Now although the app is relatively basic in terms of graphics, it feels a little sluggish and slow to respond.

So we were left with a dilemma - would you make a compromise about the quality of the product just to get a first major customer you would love to have on your porfolio?
The World Cares About OpenStreetMap
Bipartisan bill introduced to forbid California from helping NSA
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Rust[1] yet. It's a systems programming language that has managed to get rid of null pointers by carefully controlling the ways in which a a value can be constructed[2].

[1] http://www.rust-lang.org/

[2] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-language-FAQ#how-do...
Assuming the causes of the crashes are not caused by faulty hardware, but by bugs in software, a faster CPU at best means it can crash faster, but doesn't really do anything for avoiding crashes.