skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read Mindstorms after Bret Victor recommended a couple years ago, and find myself going back to it quite often as I research learning systems. In it, Seymour Papert mentions emotion and feeling as important concepts in mental model building[0]. You might find it an interesting viewpoint.

"What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the “laws of learning” must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form."

It is also worth reading Papert's colleague Marvin Minsky's book, The Emotion Machine. It makes quite a more interesting study of emotion as the foundation of understanding[1].

[0] http://llk.media.mit.edu/courses/readings/gears-v1.pdf

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emotion_Machine
DDB is specifically limited to patents not copyright which is what we are discussing here.

DSC Communications Corp. v. Evan Brown is more relevant, and highlights while I will never live in Texas.... But I should have also said that most of these employment contracts are governed by State law, not Federal law so the amount of bullshit the companies are allowed to get away with is highly varies from state to state. Texas is the worse when it comes to employee protections. DSC would have been laughed out of court here.

Medsphere v. Shreeve was settled out of court so has no bearing on this discussion.
I'd never seen or heard about it before. I think it has been overshadowed in pop culture history by the 1984 ad the year before.
Flashcards are not enough to make a linguist, however I doubt that you would hire a developer who said that they didn't need to know what parameters were necessary/accepted for common functions in their language(s). While it's not enough it is certainly a requirement that there be some memorization in terms of vocabulary in order to hit the point where context starts to be informative as opposed to a crutch.
It's because equality comparisons in CoffeeScript (==, !=, is, isnt) are always compiled into strict (non-type-converting) comparisons (===, !==). [1]

JavaScript doesn't have strict relational operators (>, <, >=, <=), so all relational comparisons undergo type-conversion. [2]

CoffeeScript: 0 <= "" <= 0 # True
JavaScript: (0 <= "" && "" <= 0); // True

CoffeeScript: "" is 0 # False
JavaScript: "" === 0; // False

[1]: http://coffeescript.org/#operators

[2]: http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/5.1/#sec-11.8

EDIT: Forgot to include 'is' and 'isnt' operators.
I did not mean to imply they were a soulless company, I love rackspace, I am a (very small) customer of theirs never had anything less than a great experience.

However my experience with corporate legal at any company is the people therein have complete lack of humanity or decency. They have sold their souls for BMW and a 6-7 figure salary.
This requires me to use mouse to navigate between fields. I really prefer to not get my hands off the keyboard when I start typing something. Tab key is there for a reason.

And I can't review in a single glance whenever I typed everything right.
> China conquered China, unifying a large area of territory under one government

The land between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers is relatively flat, making it easier for the Han to unite. When the grand canal was built, the economies of scale of trade made the Tang prosperous.

> Historically, they have not shown much inclination to capture foreign territory and colonize it (even when they could have done so easily)

I don't know if they could have captured foreign territory easily. The hilly southern areas weren't always part of China, but they took it over when they were able. China's surrounded by forests to the southwest, mountains to the west, deserts to the north, and ocean to the east and south, all hard barriers to penetrate. It's easier for nomadic cavalry from the desert to come down and raid, they often did and even ruled China for 100 yrs.

The Chinese then built a navy and probably would have taken over various ports along the coast from Vietnam to Tanzania, but the Ming leaders were so afraid the Mongolians (or similar) would re-invade, they closed down the entire navy and diverted all military resources to securing the northern border, building the Forbidden City and Great Wall.

Like all governments, if they can take over more land, they will.
Some people find portrayals of mass suicide by jumping off a cliff horrifying.
I once crashed Squeak by making true := false. It was an interesting experience.
One questions you should ask is why you want to learn this topic. I spent several years learning and I'm still of intermediate skill. I am now beginning to realize that dist systems might be useful when it comes time to scale your startup but likely not appropriate when you are first building the product.

Of course, if u are interested for love of knowledge that is another matter.

There are at least two old text books on dist systems. I have both but they are pretty hard to read/abstract. I think the best way to learn is to read academic papers. Read: dynamo, big table, cassandra, some papers on dhts like chord.

I started reading seven dbs in seven week and am really learning a lot. It doesnt focus on dist systems but when you see the different systems in action, you get some useful insights. E.g. Think about how riak id different from redis.

There was some group in new haven that was planning to host a two day seminar on dist systems. If you search old hn submissions, youll find it.(sorry, dont have a link handy as I am on vacay).
In Forth, the following are fairly common definitions in the core:

0 CONSTANT 0
1 CONSTANT 1
-1 CONSTANT -1

In an Algolian language like C++ or Java, if the syntax were legal, these would be:

const 0 = 0;
const 1 = 1;
const -1 = -1;

The reason for this is to do with the interpreter. How the Forth interpreter works is very simple:

1. Read one word, where "word" is literally defined as "a sequence of non-space characters delimited by spaces". Some standard words include DUP 2DROP 1+ - . " and :

2. Attempt to find the word in the dictionary. If found, execute it.

3. If it's not found, attempt to interpret it as a number. If that works, push the number on the stack.

4. If neither 2 nor 3 succeed, emit an error message.

So the reason for defining a constant named "0" is to save time: it's quicker to interpret the word "0" if it's in the dictionary; otherwise you have to search the whole dictionary and then do a text-to-number conversion, which takes too long.

So really it does make sense.
Is there some sort of end to end encryption available for this or any other WebRTC-based VOIP app?
I'll second this -- #salt is a welcoming channel full of informed and helpful types. Similarly #mynt. Heck, I'd suggest that almost any free software project where at least one of the primary developers loiters would be an answer to your question.
Functional Vectors, Maps, and Sets in Julia Programming Language
USDCHF: Risk Builds Up On The 0.9156 Level.
Actually, it defines a verb that puts 3 on the stack and names it "2".
Csh is almost always wrong
Why Germans Have Longer Vacation Times and More Productivity
Developer on appear.in here: Everything between peers is encrypted using SRTP end-to-end by default. From our FAQ:

"All communication between your browser and appear.in is transmitted over an encrypted connection (SSL). Video and audio transmitted in the service is sent directly between the participants in a room and is encrypted (SRTP) with client generated encryption keys. In some cases, due to NAT/firewall restrictions, the encrypted data content will be relayed through our server."
> (amusingly, from your link: 'Does not work in Firefox (neither Stable nor Nightly), but works in Chrome Dev and Safari.')

It's most likely problem with polyfills, not with dart2js compilation problem, I have not tried to debug it yet.
But probably mostly not from the bottom quintile, which means this doesn't show up much in income mobility discussions.
The Coldest Spot in the Known Universe
What other response would be expected from a very quiet commercial? It's not really a scream and cheer inducing spot.
> ... and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.

If you see your partner doing that then it's basically over. All you can do is plan exit strategy.
#programming-language-you-really-like and #distro-you-really-like on Freenode I guess...
#defocus / ##defocus
I think merijn got the highscore in the conversation though :-P
> you missed the qualifying remainder of that sentence, which that PHP isn't awful, but rather that the code looked janky.

In which case there was no need to remark "because it's written in PHP" other than to appeal to the HN PHP sucks hivemind for upvotes.

> This makes me nervous when part of my mission is privacy.

Then you should not be using Dropbox. At all. At least owncloud is open source. Audit it yourself and patch any security hole you find if you really care about privacy.

> Some of the 3rd party plugins look like a security nightmare.

Disable them if you feel this way.

> PHP by itself has had some security problems, but combine that with poor programming practices and I avoid it

PHP has problems sure, but so does every language. I assume you're referring to owncloud (re. poor programming) as opposed to PHP as whole. Perhaps it is true, but at least with owncloud you have the option of fixing problems you notice, a luxury the closed source binary alternative does not offer you.
> 2. The "slow,fast" and "love,hardcore" trends illustrate an interesting trend. Perhaps towards women or mainstream viewers.

I don't think so [1]

[1] https://www.google.nl/search?q=teen+loves+to&oq=teen+loves+t...
##programming on freenode is terrible. Don't go there.
Quantum vacuum plasma thruster
Linux on the NUC: Using Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, and the SteamOS beta
Saving this to check out later, the idea sounds pretty cool!
C switch fallthrough. I know it's old and everybody's used to it and I get why it's there, but it's freaking weird. I love c#'s response that you must use goto <case> instead to make fallthrough explicit.
You are right, and thank you for the link. Actually, let me use this to advertise my own fork of PdfViewer:

https://github.com/amkhlv/pdfviewer

I started that fork because I could not find a viewer which would keep vertical position, and jump back after following an internal link, and have bookmarks with charhints.

There is a conceptual problem, however: as I said, I feel that PDF is getting deprecated because of insufficient demand. If this is true, then it does not make much sense to invest effort into TeX + PDF. Maybe I am wrong.
Sometimes I think that I am simply allergic to TeX :)
And yet, the Army is comprised of the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, Royal Signals, Royal Armoured Corps, etc etc etc.
in vb.net: off-by-one array sizes so people who do one-based arrays don't get hurt. Also, two sets of boolean operators, the simpler ones don't short-circuit (or vs orelse, and vs andalso).
Both this one and 1984 ad could be made into great spoof ads about Mac and iPhone users today. How the world has changed.
From my understanding 3D secure would go a long way to help protect against chargebacks. Why not make it optional?

https://support.stripe.com/questions/does-stripe-support-3d-...
#shitfire!!! (on freenode). ;)
I do believe the first deployment of these scanners was at Amsterdam's Schipol airport. They were deployed at the time of the infamous Underwear Bomber that supposedly led to the US deploying them. This is the same Schipol airport where the Underwear Bomber went through security before boarding his flight to the US.
Edison wasn't above a bit of patent charlatanry himself on occaision, so he might just find it amusing. Though I may just patent making Edison spin in his grave as a means of providing power. I'm sure I can get the patent office to grant it.
As a long time Smalltalk lover, I can only UP this project !
I'll have no use for it immediately, but it's good to know where it can be found.
I'm not sure I would call a false start an easter egg. It is a fairly standard penalty called all the time in real life games. The reason it was special enough to mention in the article is that he had specifically turned off penalties for the game.
Microsoft please clean your store of junk
Overall, I found the whole setup pretty painless, definitely simpler than setting up a local Postgres database on my Mac

Have you tried http://postgresapp.com/ ? Doesn't get much easier than that.

Btw., depending on your geo needs it might sometimes be simpler to use earthdistance instead of PostGIS:

https://gist.github.com/norman/1535879

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/earthdistance.html
Also note that Perl has its own hosted IRC channels at irc.perl.org
Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Awesome!!! Thank you for creating this!
Jaw-dropping
This question is a beautiful invitation for everyone to defend their favorite languages! :)
Knowing how to do business networking is a talent and a skill that can be trained, so I would say being well connected is a subset of this thing called meritocracy.
#wikipedia-en is a channel where english wikipedia editors and admins hang out, and it is fun watching their discussions. #wikimedia-dev is where most of Mediawiki development happens these days, so that is nice too. #wikimedia-opearations is fun too once you ignore the icinga bot spam - not often do you get to see a world class ops team operate that transparently :)
+1. Bash people are great.
Well hurrah for the internet. Wait long enough and read selectively enough and you can always get the answer you want.
Typeset In The Future | Dedicated to fonts in sci-fi
I've flown to the USA from the UK twice, once in 2012 and again in 2013. It was notably different from most of my other flying experiences, but only on the US side - UK side was BAU. Both times I had to give fingerprints and answer a bunch of questions which is a lot more than I'm used to. In 2013 I was directed to go through a MW scanner, but it was a very casual thing, everyone was going through them as they had placement similar to metal detectors (i.e. you couldn't really go through security without going through them). They were actually very cool in a way, very small, very fast, very futuristic. It was all such a rush, and with such an assumption that you were going to go through this thing, that it didn't even occur to me to opt-out. I think next time I will, just to see what that is like.

The only other place I've been that was similar at the border was Russia (I haven't flown into Russia, but flying out I went through.. some sort of scanner. They didn't tell me what it was, it was about 10x the size of the US ones, big white metal box, covered in radiation warnings, totally dark on the inside) Actually, the USA reminded me more of Russia than any other country I've been to, with the questioning, the scanners, being given grief if you questioned anything, and of course - the paperwork.
It seems down.
Now obviously, c arrays are just strips of memory allocated to that array, so you can access them using the address of the start of the address and the offset (number of array items to skip). To access them, you sum the address and the offset, then you have the address of the item.

[~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[a~~~~~~~b~~]~~~] Memory
^–––––––––––––––––^ Address
^–––––––^ Offset

And now, a[b] is just short hand for the pointer arithmetic going on and you could just use any two ints and access any arbitrary memory address (i assume the compiler enforces that this doesn't happen).

address[offset] => *(address + offset) => getValueAtAddress(valueIn(address) + valueIn(offset))

a[b] => *(a + b) => getValueAtAddress(valueIn(a) + valueIn(b))
b[a] => *(b + a) => getValueAtAddress(valueIn(a) + valueIn(b))

Those two are obviously the same so *(a + b) == b[a] == a[b]
great idea. How did you go about marketing this?
Wouldn’t Turing-complete file formats be difficult to search because the output could have arbitrary syntax and the crawler would have to run the code. On the other hand, why not make use of faster machines.
SnapChat via the Web
The bad news about the Black Death
FOSDEM 2014 – Video Streams
What's next? "Functional lambda calculus"?
As much as Apple's review process and curating can be a pain in the ass. This definitely shows the other end of the spectrum and what happens if you don't have any reviewing.
But can't they re-purpose the existing studios, employees and have it cost way less than $527 million? I mean is $527 million worth saving the time of re-purposing the studios and employees? I just dont know. I guess to them it is...
Ask HN: Cloned side project
I've been working on something, as a side project. But I ran into somebody else who recently released a similar product.

Should I continue to work on mine? Or ditch it because it is redundant anyways?
Actually, both are acceptable in this case. If you read the abbreviation using the words they stand for, i.e. "non-disclosure agreement", then "a" is correct. If you read the abbreviation as letters, i.e. "N-D-A", then "an" is correct.

Source: http://www.gpuss.co.uk/english_usage/a_or_an.htm
I think the whole channel joining in on the "we're going to troll you back by being super nice" is the real winner.
I use Stripe for my SaaS app, but for all my digital download products (ebooks and courses) I use Gumroad [1] which actually has really great fraud prevention. Not only that, but Gumroad will fight a chargeback on your behalf and if they lose they cover the fees. That includes both the credit card fees and the $20-30 chargeback fee.

You know a company that has taken responsibility for the related charges will work hard to fight fraud.

Disclosure: I really like selling through Gumroad (and once they sponsored a workshop I taught).

[1] http://gumroad.com
Sounds like cases where the owners of the trademarks (Faceboook, Google and Mozilla) should get active.
I'm not sure anyone objects to curating, per se, more the fact that Apple isn't transparent, fair, or consistent about what causes an app to be rejected.
Can you do the job?
HACKED!
Can you define the job?
I don't know that there are too many interesting "abstract" IRC communities, beyond those Freenode channels specific to a given programming language or technology.

I leave a connection to Freenode running while I'm at work, in a few channels related to my job... so that during builds, or other short bursts of idle time, I can glace over and see if there are any questions I can answer. Likewise, I throw out a quick question of my own every now and then, when I'm afraid it's too subjective in nature to avoid being closed by StackOverflow-lawyers.

I've lost interest in general chat, outside of specific questions and answers. From what I've seen, the nicer communities are the newer channels. Ironically, they degrade over time as their underlying technology matures. You would think that channels like #clojure and #go-nuts would be populated by immature hipsters, while ##java would be made up of 40-something corporate types. However, I've found that those first two channels are welcoming and thoughtful, with interesting discussion always taking place... whereas ##java (even its mods) frequently sound like pre-teens yelling profanity at each other on XBox Live.
It was news regarding Facebook apps 2-3 month ago, that Microsoft will remove them all.

As you can see its not done :(
"CAL is scheduled to launch in early 2016 on a Pressurized Cargo Vehicle in soft-stowage. " [cal = Cold Atom Lab]

http://coldatomlab.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/

Kids born in the future will get to see quantum mech first hand. I'm envious.
The root problem here is the single storefront exhibited in each of the major device universes: Apple Store, Microsoft Store, etc...a permanent solution to the problem is simple. Create a series of storefronts that are tiered. You can get almost anything into the dollar store equivalent. And then you have to apply to move into the higher tier, or a focused tier. It should cost money to do so -- which could be paid back out of sales at the new tier.

Physical stores have buyers who inspect products, negotiate, and select. App stores need to the same thing.

It's been a long time since I've bought anything on an app store. There's just way too much crap to wade through, making it a waste of time.
Why young coders are holding YRS/Google assemblies
A friend and I published some apps on the Microsoft store a few years ago, when it was still for Windows Phone 7. We've received several emails from Microsoft saying we need to update this and that or our apps will be removed. Because the apps never did that well - not surprisingly in hindsight given the market size - we never updated them. However we still get checks occasionally from the proceeds. Microsoft never removed them. I think they're just desperate to have apps in their store and inflated app numbers they can brag about. They obviously know what to do, but just aren't doing it.
Microsoft truly never ceases to amaze me. Good reminder of why I hate them. I was almost starting to believe that WP is actually quite good.
My bank has done the same in the past, but now the offer an interface in online banking to inform them when I'm travelling.

It still annoys me though: Their fraud system keeps flagging regular transactions that I've done for similar amounts to the same companies, at the same times of month or year for years, yet when someone did two transfers of 3000 GBP each to a credit card account in a different bank that I've never dealt with before, in someone elses name, their fraud system did not trigger...

From my perspective, their blocks are nothing but a nuisance.
I'd argue that running a business providing services which are attractive primarily to criminals, like anonymously converting one means of payment to another for a 50% margin, is unethical even though money transmission per se isn't. YMMV
The American Revolution was fought in large part over tax rates (and much lower ones than we're subject to now). Confiscate enough of one's fairly-earned wages and and he'll fight back.
Thats an easy one to fake the correct answer though.
I just wanted to reply here with "You are my hero" .
But someone beat me to it. I must subscribe now.

This also fires up my drive to get more into Radio's and radio astronomy. It so fun to be able to grab all that stuff from the air that most people are unaware of.
I got my first handheld a while ago, and people were like "WOW amaze" when There was a really clear night in Budapest, Hungary with the ISS 70deg. overhead, and I was picking up Russian com while pointing to the illuminated station.
( -- yes unlicensed (but I don't TX) ). And now planning to get a license because more bands for the win, and licensed radio operators actually get much love from government and rescue services.

There's also lots of stuff that you can do with a cheap DVB-T tuner and simple (DIY) aerial.
Also, the fact that the curated store is the only way to get your software onto their device.

If Best Buy doesn't want to sell my PC software, I can sell it through other channels.

If Apple doesn't want to sell my iOS software, I can't.

Android lets you sell stuff outside of the play store - look how well the Humble Android bundles do.
I love Microsoft, and their technologies. I love Windows Phone. I am just not happy with the apps in the store.

I recommend you Windows Phone :)
Ha! I saw this one linked on Kotaku the other day and thought it was awesome. Part of me wishes we had spots like this in the USA, and the other part of me is happy we're not all scarred for life....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STHpMUYeznQ