skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're also champions of fleeting causes. LinkedIn yelled from the mountains about the advantages of HTML5 apps for mobile. And then they championed hybrid apps. And then they yelled about the brilliance of all native apps. In no way am I saying that we all shouldn't constantly be learning and evaluating, but if you champion something and find yourself moving a different direction, maybe downplay the evangelizing.

Though of course LinkedIn does it for the same reason that undergrads mine data to come to trendy and contrarian findings -- it gets press.
You're right and indeed the promo code generator uses a hardened version of the proposed NIST standard for FPE, called BPS. It's the result of vast academic research since 1950s, on how to shuffle, generate, unique random permutations within an arbitrary set.
3 steps to restore your health and sanity
I got stuck on Level 3, partially because Scala is a little wacky (but I learned to appreciate it!) and partially because their specs were super terrible. They didn't mention it required substring matching or was case-sensitive until I'd been working on it for 2-3 days and then was out of time. Given the bad debug output (the head of a diff which often didn't show anything and didn't include what term the failure was for) it was really frustrating to make any progress.

And he's right about the servers and scoring; that, too, was frustrating. I'd pass a test case locally then push and have it fail because it was slower for no apparent reason. Overall, it was awesome up until Level 3. I wish I'd made it to 4 because that strikes me as an actual distributed systems problem rather than a minor tweak to an existing example like the others.

It wasn't a bad experience and the system they have to manage it all is cool. I just wish a little more care had gone into making that level a bit smoother.
In both American political parties, hardly anyone is anti-birth-control. Even if you poll only Catholics, anti-birth-control people are a tiny minority. The war on birth control is about as real as the War on Christmas.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/154799/americans-including-cathol...

Some people want to defend others' rights to conscientiously object to birth control (such as opting out of certain health insurance coverage), but that's more in the vein of Voltaire's famous sentiment. More like, "I do not agree with your morality but I'll defend to the death your right to have it."
What are the potential downsides to artificially lowering wealth inequality?

One of the first things you learn in engineering and life: nothing is free. There are trade-offs and costs to every decision. I could even describe the engineering process as mapping the valley of compromises between the mountains of constraints. Where is the optimal valley between total equality and total inequality? What happens when we end up too far in either direction?
It's a trivial example. I've been writing Python since 2.3... maybe I should stop.
I recently did a project that didn't use jQuery in order to keep my code smaller. It was an embedded 3rd-party widget, so keeping the code as small as possible was a key requirement. The code I wrote supports down to IE7, but IE7 wasn't really the biggest issue.

The real problem with not using jQuery is that all of the collective knowledge we have about browser inconsistencies is encapsulated in jQuery. When you run into this, and Google it, you'll find a million StackOverflow answers telling you to use jQuery, and if you get lucky a blog post from 2007 that actually answers your question. The result is that you end up spending time reverse-engineering jQuery to get your thing working.

To be clear, in my case the tradeoff was worth it (the code for my entire widget including the bits of library I had to write is smaller than jQuery), but it's not a tradeoff I would make unless I had a good reason.
Lots of middle-aged people who are needing to develop new skills with lots of time on their hands. Sounds like a good business opportunity for a creative entrepreneur in the education space.
15+ inspiring website drop down menus
When I worked at a call center, I eventually was promoted to call monitor, where I was actually the person listening to the recordings and grading reps on how they did. Our system did not record every call. It was a random sampling, and I had to hope a given MSR got recorded enough times in a month for me to hit my minimums.
>comments like the one you replied to are exactly the kind we don't need.

GP here. :)

I'm 100% in favor of using technology "to offset much of what we've done, largely as a fault of technological advancement." After all, rainwater collection is technology! But desalination isn't that kind of technology — it's the destructive kind.

My question was genuine. What advantage does plastic greenhouse desalination have over rooftop rainwater harvesting? It uses less land. It costs less. It produces less pollution. No piped distribution to tear up the streets for every 50 years. No energy needed to pump water long distances.

The only advantage I can see is that under desalination, someone gets to control your access to water. Advantageous for them I mean.
Yes, but neither company is great at publishing cross-platform apps. I gave the "network effects" example to point out that "killing Snapchat" wouldn't be so simple as having built-in iOS functionality - because the people that Snapchat users like snapchatting with are already all in Snapchat and might not carry over to a new platform-only service.
> In other words, anything that isn't False is True. :D

Except for `nil` (lisps, ruby), and possibly a host of other things depending on the language (empty strings in javascript).
Small suggestion: add navigation arrows at the bottom of the page as well.
jQuery provides a uniform API that is guaranteed to work on supported browsers. The jQuery team does all the work to back that guarantee. If I rely on raw JS, then I'm one glitchy browser implementation away from being broken.

Even worse: suppose you build a product with the approach you recommend, it's very successful, and then your sales team makes a major sale to a stodgy old bank that still uses IE7. Or maybe you just never make the sale because you don't support the browser they use.

OK, let's say we should all turn away money from IE7 users because it's insecure and old. For OP's strategy to work, we have to assume all browsers we care about will be compatible going forward. I think this is a very unsafe assumption to make. While one small incompatibility would only be a minor annoyance, once you have more than a handful of these, a compatibility layer like jQuery again looks very nice.

And none of this even speaks to the fact that the jQuery implementation in the source article is generally at least as short and readable as the alternative, or that most people are more familiar with the jQuery version.

The only reason I can think of for dumping jQuery is maybe speed optimization, and even in that case, well-implemented jQuery should be no slower than the native speed plus the cost of a function call. If it's slow and you want to optimize something, why not optimize/bug-fix jQuery itself and help everyone, not just your one project?
Code Salon
Max Butler's forums got infiltrated by a task force composed of FBI and Secret Service personnel, not the CIA.

Black hats generally network on IRC. You sit on some public IRC channel, build rapport [1][2], and eventually get invited to private channels.

There are plenty of resources out there on how to harden your server and reduce attack surfaces. You just need to spend more time familiarizing yourself with the landscape and quantify your actual goals.

1. http://guerrillamerica.com/2013/12/source-recruitment/

2. http://guerrillamerica.com/2014/01/source-handling-part-one/
One Kings Lane raises $112 Million
This: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

(Slightly related to the article)
Six decades of global warming visualized in 15 seconds by NASA
If you run Linux with systemd, then you already have this for the most part.

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/shared/...

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/tree/src/detect-...
querySelector and querySelectorAll could have been pretty great, but they suffer from some serious problems as they ended up spec'd.

The one I hate most is that qSA returns Yet Another JavaScript Collection That Is A Lot Like An Array But Isn't An Array And Therefore Doesn't Have Any Of The Nice Methods(TM). Yes, you're going to have to iterate over the thing using an index in a loop.

There's others:

http://ejohn.org/blog/thoughts-on-queryselectorall/

I'm really not sure how the standards-makers got this so terribly wrong given that the libraries had already started to solve the problem.
Baseball catchers spend a lot of time in a squatting position. I was always told that it really messes up their knees.
Anyone else seeing links to empty repos?
[rant about another no name site accepting Bitcoin only for publicity]
Coursera cybersecurity specialization
Effective at what though?

The problem with these one-size-fits-all "exercise for N minutes" memes is that every person has different goals for what they want to get out of exercise.
I don't understand why so many comments here seem to have skipped over the word "might" and the entire introduction. The point isn't stop using jQuery. The point isn't even don't ever use jQuery for plugins. It's simply that if you're only using a couple features of jQuery, consider eliminating the dependency. Why is there so much backlash to that?
Great B2B SaaS Products Remove Technical Dependency
Thoughts on Ruby Gems
This site [1] reveals the secret to that pocket calculator shortcut and a few others, and also provides useful algorithms for calculating things such as square roots and logarithms.

[1] http://tedmuller.us/Math.htm
Yeah, when that guy was covered recently in the TLDR Podcast, there was no mention that he was basically spamming, and we shouldn't be glorifying people who are making a huge mess while scrounging around for change in the couch cushions of the internet.
As an avid weight lifter out on a two month backpacking trip, this is just what the doctor ordered. Ya I could always just do the moves on my own but I am not as comfortable with body weight stuff as I am with a bar. 99¢ well spent!
Adult-sized 'Little Tikes' takes to the road
Technology and wealth Inequality Promotion
Last Month on ESPN:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1872958-football-fans-cle...
http://www.quora.com/JavaScript-programming-language/If-a-br...
document.querySelectorAll() uses the same kind of syntax for selectors as jQuery.
It does feel like we have moved backwards. To go off topic a bit I think the social interaction aspect of net has become quite central atleast in my computer usage and it feels strange that it's hard to express across applications that this person is the same pseudonym and I am very interested in contacting him but don't really care via which protocol it happens. Now we have systems build around files and maybe pipes, but there should be global metaphors for the 'who'. Who are you trying to reach, who did this file, who could read this.
I don't like that most of the XMPP client on Android are presenting the roster of contacts instead of my conversations I'm currently having. Those are important to me. That is why I prefer systems like Hangouts or WhatsApp.

So most XMPP clients looks odd for me, they try to look like desktop clients. Which doesn't work on Android I think.
This is a great resource, even though it's not really about jQuery, it's about the success of HTML5. The fact that we have a working DOM, XHR, and a better understanding of polyfills in general does tip the balance away from depending on a "fix it" library.

I can see myself reaching for this page a lot. And the author has a point as the only reason I used Zepto on my last project was one of the libraries I needed used it.

If I am gonna use a fix it library today, it's more about nodejs/browser compatibility than worrying about browser issues.
Or, you know, opening the site in their phone.
Kurzweil would probably respond that nanobots and the singularity will fix everything.
In this form you perform the lookup twice: once to test 'x' in d and then again to actually get the value d['x']. Try clauses in Python are very inexpensive if they pass (don't raise an exception), so often the try..except version would be preferable.

In any event don't optimize prematurely and use a profiler rather than guessing if performance is an issue. ;-)
I'm not sure what you mean about "complexity for users of your head browsers". The idea of the fallback/polyfill is that it doesn't even come into effect for the modern browsers.

As far as latency is concerned, I hear you and that makes sense, but the things I'm talking about are not very big, so the latency gain isn't going to matter much for our purposes.

Yeah, we definitely look at the analytics. But even if it the old browser users are sub 1 percentage point, I see the number and think, "I could take this 5 line polyfill out, but then these 1000 uniques wouldn't work."

And I just don't have the heart...
Or in other words: YMNNJQ
I agree with the overall message- you should be thoughtful with all your dependencies. You should only add complexity when it makes sense.

However, the author goes beyond just selector vs. getElementById().

Does the way the author uses XMLHttpRequest work in other browsers the way it works in IE? I honestly dont even remember anymore.

How about the code for fade? I never even knew the details of this feature. And I'm not sure I want to.
Er, you totally read that wrong. Switch the terms "developer" and "user" in your analogy.
As near as I can tell, browsers are already at least sometimes caching compiled representations of JS; the win from shipping specific versions of jQuery would be minimal, and not work unless you used specific CDNs anyhow.
This is awesome! Please launch in Seattle.
Wow, sorry! http://hundredpushups.com
What is the state of power saving related XEPs which are critical for battery life on mobile? Looks like nothing is moving anywhere. For example XEP-0273 is still deferred:

http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0273.html

I'd worry about this even before anything else when it comes to XMPP on mobile, since otherwise your client can be a hungry monster eating up your battery in no time.
I'm confused by this. Surely with all of the negative PR any use of @n by a company/person would point to the person who was responsible?
Did anyone ever take you up on your hackathon idea?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6645426
It takes character to change when things aren't working. Good on AnyPerk!
Great to see Github recognizing processes for security researchers between the ages of 13-18 in the FAQ. In the new age of crowdsourced skills, it's good to see age not playing a part as a barrier.
DOMContentLoaded doesn't even get close to the jQuery counterpart $(document).ready. To start if the DOM is already loaded DOMContentLoaded won't fire and won't call the callback. On the other hand ready will notice that the DOM is loaded and fire the CB right away.
For 1, I was wondering about that too - it seems like such an odd thing to do. Who knows what the latest JIT-y stuff and cached responses could do to how fast things run? Just set it before you send, like any normal developer would, and get rid of the need to worry about it.
Precisely. Most intelligent people understand very quickly that it isn't their technical ability that will make them wealthy, but the ability to commandeer the technical ability of others at the lowest possible price. Hence, the H1-B, or voluntary indentured servitude with the carrot of a green card.

Why does this perpetuate? Informational asymmetry aided by naive hope, marketing, and desperation. The "American Dream" is the most viral marketing campaign in the history of mankind, spread by Hollywood around the globe. As such, there's a never-ending lineup of suckers waiting to take the plunge.
Pasture: Secure Offline Data Access Using Commodity Trusted Hardware
A workaround for testing controllers in Rails 4 engines
I think since that article came out sass included a new very nice feature in the form of mixins[0].

Also, Compass[1] is awesome when working with sass, but I don't know if there is a less equivalent.

[0]http://sass-lang.com/guide#6

[1]http://compass-style.org/
In theory there is absolutely nothing wrong with singletons.

In practice singletons become God objects where hack upon hack upon hack is placed.

Eventually to modify a program in a safe way you end up needing to understand the entire program because everything depends on the singleton and the singleton depends on everything else.

Singletons like writing an entire program using only global vars are a tradeoff, you tradeoff maintainability and design for performance and ease of (initial) implementation.

In the long term maintainability is usually more important than performance and ease of initial implementation.
Isn't the point here that JQuery is reinventing a lot of core JavaScript stuff? It isn't reinvention if it is already there.

JQuery has down sides other than size. There is also maintenance, dependency and backwards compatibility issues.

EDIT: Plus it adds a lot of extra syntactic mess, extra () $ and .
Show HN: DevCasts – Hand-picked developer screencasts
I doesn't make sense to point fingers without proof.

PayPal says that they did find records of the attempt, and they state affirmatively that they did not provide any credit card details. It sounds to me like they are saying they listened to a recording of the call, and they know they didn't disclose any credit card details.

If you're PayPal in this situation, how do you know the hacker doesn't have their own recording of the call? It would be one thing to claim no record of a call. But I think it would be incredibly reckless to claim you found the records, and you know you didn't disclose anything, if/when in fact you did.

The fact is, there's nothing PayPal can do to prove a negative. If the hacker, or anyone else, produces actual proof that PayPal discloses this information improperly (not just claiming it's easy), I'm sure we will see how PayPal responds then.
I'm all for figuring out how to use the nanobots we have (aka biology).

Advantage: they self-replicate royalty free, something the nanobot company would never allow.
I don't understand why this is some big, ground shaking app.

This is what the Facebook app itself should be. Instead of improving their terrible news feed, they make this.
When I worked my way through SICP I found the following javascript based scheme REPL very useful:

http://bluishcoder.co.nz/jsscheme/

Unfortunately, searching for jsscheme in Google gives you a list of many different projects that either share the same name or have a very similar name.
Hear hear.

Its a seller's market for programmers, but the traditional recruiter style means you don't hear a single thing about a company until you're on the phone with them (and they're trying to figure out whether you're competent). Requirements lists are NOT the way to engage people who are just looking for better opportunities (but don't necessarily need a new job).

Also regarding how recruiters handle things... about half of recruiters just want to match your resume bullet points to a list. They ignore important things like domain knowledge and the ability of a coder to learn new things. Oh, you have 5 years in .net, rails and HTML/CSS, but you haven't used their lightweight CSS framework yet? Sorry, we're looking for someone that matches better. I have yet to meet a recruiter that has any idea how much time and effort it takes to learn any particular technology over some other. Learning and being able to apply the fundamentals of OO programming takes a heck of a lot longer than swapping from C# to Java, or from Backbone to Angular.
Possibly because you haven't moved to Python 3?
Funny thing is, the iOS app on the website has a "Quick Abs" in-app purchase;
Sucks to be Jason Calacanis right now, who JUST launch "Inside" app that basically tries to do this - http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/27/inside-mobile-news-launch/
I suspect some companies don't implement XMPP because it's too complex for simple messaging with very little upside. For a startup why worry about potential future interoperability with Google services(?), which would add months of engineering to get things right? YAGNI.
This is a great, if somewhat basic list. My $0.02: Python is a tool for thinking clearly. That you can run your "thoughts" as written is a very nice bonus, of course.

There are some really interesting things that Python allows:

>>> d = {}
>>> d[23], d[14], d['hmm'] = 'abc'
>>> d
{'hmm': 'c', 14: 'b', 23: 'a'}
Internet Explorer drops to single-digit market share
Beats my half ass attempt: http://defyent.com/fitin7/app
I disagree. A startup's goal is to share their mission and product in a way that is shareable. A pitch video that is pure product features is nothing more than boring advertising.
Does it print klingon etc?
"We don't do Microsoft's beta-testing for them."

Wow... that really assumes a lot on their part to have that attitude. Like... MS will give a rat's ass about how some crappy Oracle app will work in their latest browsers. Or that anyone will take Oracle's response of "report this bug to MS" six months later as useful. But... this is probably the same attitude other big vendors have about Oracle's stuff too.

Wow...
if it's not good enough, can I get the extra minute for free?
AWS billing, RI utilization, growing complexities in the cloud
The new AWS detailed billing & RI usage reports are okay for simple environments. But if your environment is large, complex or becoming that way how do you deal with issues when its time to scale?

Download the whitepaper to find out:

http://info.cloudhealthtech.com/white-paper-growing-complexities-in-the-cloud
And solar is rapidly out-competing and out-innovating both.
Get a Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

For a 1 year old, it's just a stacking game, later on, she can learn how it really works.
It doesn't feel like we've moved backwards. It feels as if we just remained in the stone age of instant messaging. Even Google who pretended to be the "white knight" of IM, betrayed everyone by dropping XMPP federation in Hangouts and by not opening the Hangouts protocol.

I personally just use XMPP. I don't care about 5+ walled garden services and I'm not interested in proliferating them any further by participating. If my contacts aren't on XMPP - I simply don't communicate with them through IM. There is always e-mail for such cases.

If any other open and better successor to XMPP will come along - I'll consider switching or using it in addition. But so far there is simply nothing else out there.
As in they actually advocate it? One of my misfeatures is that I tend to ask annoying questions of powerful people, and really pissed off the Mayor of Sunnyvale one year when they were advocating re-developing school property into commercial real estate. I think I said, "Are you saying it would be better for my children if there kids, my grandchildren, had no where to go to school but could hang out at a Target?"
I think a 7-minute workout is better than nothing, but if your day is so packed that you can't cut out an hour for the gym you should probably rethink your schedule.
Time magazine Sochi Olympics – US vs Rest,  cover difference
I think the point is that "$.contains(el, child)" is not a useful abstraction of "el.contains(child)".
but what if owners is something that looks like a dict but is not? same for name.