skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In anything dealing with security, unfortunately the nitty-gritty implementation details wind up mattering as much (if not more) than the theoretical portion.

Specially if buffer exploits and pointer misuses are to be taken into account.
According to TIOBE, it looks like C# stands no chance of ever catching Java. (End of troll feeding)

What I find really interesting about your comment is that I always thought C# was the closest equivalent to Java there was, and that I'd be happy using it if I was developing in the Microsoft eco-system (I gave up on QuickBasic/VisualBasic). It would make more sense if you were sniping at a language you felt was inferior if that language was also signicantly different than Java.

P.S. I didn't downvote you either
I don't think anyone, regardless of gender, should be forced to "fit in with mainstream hacker culture".
This reminds me of the question of are we some of the last humans to exist (species ends on earth) or some of the first (great golden galactic future)

Either way we won't ever find out - so how we behave is really a matter of faith - not in God but in our descendants ability to keep going up.

I'm voting for optimisim :-)
"We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always t..."

/watch?v=zGmfiKowrYU
I've had 20 years of dealing with C style parentheses and I've learned to parse it visually at a glance. I can't do the same with languages which use significant white space instead.

I imagine I could train myself to do so, but there is a cost involved.
That was introduced back in Java 7.
Oh god, it generates history each time you flap...
Every voting system incorporates certain preferences. They are built in, and cannot be removed from the system. In this case, the voting system used essentially incorporates the idea that relative ranking is important - something that the voter ranked #2 is more preferable to the voter than something the voter ranked #10.

So the idea that the algorithm ended up picking something ranked #2 by everybody over something ranked #1 by some people and #10 by some people is not actually crazy.

If you choose a system with ten gradations of voting, that's what you get - choices that are #2 for everyone are preferred over choices that are #10 for some people. If you don't like that result, don't choose that voting system. That's what a ten-point voting system is.

By the way, the images are wrong - the text implies that Matt ranked Newbie Hbase very low, but the image shows the opposite.
I've wanted to mention this for a while but the topic hadn't come up. My engineering faculty tried many things to get more girls in the program, including having girls-only events with the female dean. Of course, all students got these emails, and many of us guys were left wondering why we never had the chance to meet the dean in events like these.

Excluding sometimes seems worse than the biases these programs aim to solve.
> Our culture is so completely and utterly obsessed with money that everyone says he's an idiot for taking down an app without realizing the chaos one goes through in a situation like that.

It is not obsession with money, it is just confusion over it. I mean, it isn't that hard to ignore all the bad comments and emails, and a small price to pay for riches. There must be something else going on, and that is the bit that is frustrating, not knowing.

Of course, it is completely up to him, and this is in no way justification for awful comments or messages to the dev.
Game Over: You Can't Download 'Flappy Bird' Anymore
I love it. If this could transparently convert to and from normal Python I could see wrapping it in an editor plugin so that the braces could be visible to those of us who prefer them, while the output could remain traditional Python for interoperability with an established codebase.
Interesting. So there were a lot of reaction-style vines of people playing Flappy Bird?
Man pays the price for affair
Man pays the price for affair.
This is why artists release "mixtapes" all the time for free instead; can't sue someone who's released their tracks free of charge. I mean, I guess you could try, but you won't make much doing it.
Flappy Bird creator removes game from Apple App Store, Google Play
To answer your question, your comment is just snark that doesn't contribute to the conversation. That's probably where you went wrong.
Make a big impact with software products and projects
Young girl (13) sings a cover of the Beatles for 50th Anniversary live
But he denies that to be the case. And if it was his goal, then why is it pulling it off the app store?

Despite how rare it is to have a true grassroots viral hit, I think that's what happened in this case.
For those who want to create similar looking (in quality) graphics: Check out asymptote [1] (IMO one of the most undervalued software in the TeX community). It has a pretty nice programming language only made for drawing. It's got types, structs, modules etc and is a real joy to program. It's also very quick to compile which allows for very quick feedback loop (almost "live" editing with a keybinding on vim/emacs)

Of course, if you're already a TikZ pro then just stick with that.

To give you a taste:

http://www.marris.org/asymptote/animations/index.html

http://www.piprime.fr/developpeur/asymptote/surveys-asy/frac... (many more examples)

[1] http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/
it's called inflating your way out of debt.

It's not going to stop till the trillion or so it cost to stop the world economy collapsing is about as valuable as the outfitting for the Spanish-American war.

When the Cypriot government tried to take 6% of everyone's bank accounts there were riots in the streets. Our go ernments are doing the same thing, but we blame bankers.
You're arguing that the poetry is legitimate. Fine. Let it stand on its own. If it needs music to make it work, then make the music as well. If it needs somebody else's hit music to make it work, then maybe -- just maybe -- it can't quite stand on its own. That's not questioning the merit of the genre, but the merit of individual pieces.
The funny thing is that that Madonna song samples a Public Enemy track for its beat.

The sample was obtained without consent.

(The lyrics were also stolen from Ingrid Chavez, also without consent. She sued and won.)
折伏 – as it relates to coding
I get it. Here you have a developer who just wanted to make games, and maybe a bit of money. He creates a hit, by accident, with a game that has addicting gameplay (and it is, I personally love it).

Then everyone in the media calls his game crap and accuses him of cheating the system (without producing any proof). I'd quit too.
Better title: "Why Javascript's for/in loop is more useless than a sack of busted assholes".
I think the most interesting part of this is what the author points out: this is a story about a normal developer riding one hell of a roller-coaster.

On top of that, let's face it: the game ain't that much. It's not like there was some special secret sauce he put in there. I can guarantee you that there are another 1000+ games out there just as simple and playable as flappy bird out there.

So this story, aside from the marketing moves (which I would love to find out about as long as my best 40K other HN friends do not at the same time), is just about winning the lottery. Guy writes app, wins the lottery.

This kind of lottery keeps poor schmucks writing apps for walled garden playstores. You get ten thousand people slaving away over little apps, each one hoping to be this guy. He's the guy in the casino who hits on the slots. The casino definitely wants to make sure all the rubes see the pile of money he gets.
I guess, but it seems pretty univerally accepted that Kendrick Lamar's good kid mAAD city should have won that, so I'm not sure what using the grammys as a barometer proves.
Interesting contribution to psychology, since unknown faces are usually considered most attractive when they are average but...

If you consider a small (or not so small) social group with a common knowledge of a person considered as attractive, then you may find that people attribute attractiveness with the _non-average_ merits displayed by that person - that contradicts the theory that attractiveness with be _just_ average!

It is also sound to say that recognizable people that evoke a positive reaction may feed the "attractiveness" recognition loop stronger...

BTW Which bright statistician discovers what is flawed in both the prevalent "averaging" theory and the research mentioned in a link?

Hint: look for difference between "alien" or "unknown" faces, and faces of those that are known - and thus whose attractiveness matters more to us.
Java's type erasure, while once considered a disadvantage, is now being recognized as one of the reasons other statically typed languages can be ported to the JVM. If Java reified types, it would make interoperability with other type systems extremely hard.
I'm mostly surprised that they went into the actual parser/compiler and modified that. If I were crazy enough to do this, I'd probably just write a pythonb-to-python compiler.
I don’t think anyone was suggesting that.

Many hackers I know do have other hobbies besides hacking and they devote lots of time to those hobbies. Beer brewing, coffee making, writing poetry, music, languages, …

What if one of those hobbies is dressing fashionably? Or makeup? Or whatever?

Beyond a certain point activities are zero sum but do you seriously suggest that to be a proper hacker you have no time at all for anything beside that?

I don’t think anyone should ever feel obligated to be into dressing fashionably or makeup or even just feel obligated to dress a certain way. That’s awful. (I especially hate gender policing.) But telling someone they can only be part of the group if they aren’t into makeup isn’t all that much better than telling someone they should wear makeup to represent women better.

It’s a heuristic for identifying in-group people that makes no sense and to me seems highly destructive.
Scrapy at a glance
C is an excellent 2nd language. The language itself is obtuse, but the underlying model is fairly simple. C++ is a horrible one. These days, probably nobody should learn C++ and should probably pick up Go instead.

As a teenager, I picked up a book on C++ having already learned BASIC, Pascal, and MS-DOS but never got proficient in it. I should have picked C. The "++" lead me to believe that it was a better language than C and I didn't have any real programmers around to tell me otherwise.

Oh the missed opportunities...
You believe that the Supreme Court decided Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc incorrectly? Quoting from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v._Acuff-Rose_Music,_I.... :

> The members of the rap music group 2 Live Crew—Luke, Fresh Kid Ice, Mr. Mixx and Brother Marquis—composed a song called "Pretty Woman," a parody based on Roy Orbison's rock ballad, "Oh, Pretty Woman." ... Acuff-Rose Music refused to grant the band a license but 2 Live Crew nonetheless produced and released the parody. ... The Supreme Court held that 2 Live Crew's commercial parody may be a fair use within the meaning of § 107.

You are free of course to suggest that the law is otherwise, and even that the law itself is immoral and unethical. But as it stands, it is sometimes legal to copy portions of another's work, without a license, sell it for a profit, and be within the law.

And I am free to continue to believe that commercial parody is ethically and legally fine.
Preface: I am not a microsoft fan, or even really a C# fan, but: having used both languages C# is nothing like java except in the most superficial of ways. I'm just amused that the caretakers of java took half a decade to adopt a lot of proven useful features. I wish they'd steal more.
Which direction?
The thing is, first choice doesn't really answer any question other than "Who is the most common favorite?" That's not necessarily the same answer as what the community of voters would be most universally accepting of, or which candidate would provide the most social utility, etc, or which candidate is most preferred, etc.

The most common favorite is not the definition of democracy - it's just the method of choosing that is most common. It's sort of self-justifying; "it's what we've always done, so we should keep doing it". But, things change over time, and we have the ability to better understand large groups of preferences than we used to (when counting first choices was the only possible way to vote), which means a better ability to provide social utility and help a group of voters help themselves in the most useful way.

Anyway, ordinal method doesn't actually apply any "weight" to a 4+ choice. The concept of "weight" doesn't actually apply to a Condorcet method. All you're really communicating is that you prefer candidate #4 to candidate #5, and to candidate #6, etc. There's no extra proportional "power" or weight given to higher-ranked candidates, though, because you've already communicated that you prefer candidate #1 to all of them.

It really is the same thing as if someone gave you (n(n-1))/2 ballots of one candidate against one other, with you picking your favorite. It's just faster to communicate in ranked form. It also doesn't run afoul of "one-person, one-vote", because no voter has extra power compared to another voter.

Finally, yes - say that 49% prefer A, have B as a close second, and hate C. 49% prefer C, have B as a close second, and hate A. 2% prefer B and hate both A and C. B's definitely just the "least objectionable", but also should definitely win as the consensus choice, even though B only got 2% first-place votes.
While any software that accesses an audio interface using integer formats, VLC is to my knowledge the only average user-oriented program that can end up in such situations.

I would suggest VLC disables this feature for new installs and move it to an easily discoverable preference.

Or if they really care enough to allow their users to boost the volume levels of quiet movies to replace the gain multiplication with a proper dynamic range compressor activated when the volume goes above 100%.
AOL decides to take on the responsibilities and risks of an insurance company and then blames the employees and Obamacare when it doesn't work out? Wow. Armstrong is quite a piece of work.
Great point. I've been considering working on a tool that tried to solve this problem for health apps. It would require the user to fill out a form that teases out information about their motivations, health goals, lifestyle, etc.(the more data the better the recommendation). They'd then receive an auto generated menu of apps that'd work specifically well for them.

I've spent a lot of time talking to my Dad about healthcare (he's a doctor) and he never recommends mobile apps to his patients for weight loss or anything along those lines. I can't really blame him... there are tens of thousands of health apps. That might change if he had an online tool to send his patients to that did the heavy lifting of making an intelligent recommendation. Here's an interesting study that shows how doctors can be a powerful catalyst in this regard: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...

In the end, it'd just be an app recommendation engine for health. That aside, I 100% agree with what you're saying.
Read the other article linked here: useful experiments don't need humans even now: http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm#experim...

The reason the astronauts flip the switch to start them: "The experiments could not be made fully automatic because NASA policy requires that experiments on manned missions involve the crew." Politics, again.
Required watching [1], straight from Dale D. Myers (Deputy NASA administrator 86-89) himself. An extremely fascinating tale regarding the importance of engineering constraints in mission critical designs.

1. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-8...
I was always taught the opposite rule for PA amps - they should be rated higher than the speakers, as per http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dWILAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA118&dq=..., http://www.sweetwater.com/insync/power-amp-buying-guide/#mat... or similar. The reasoning being that a lower power amp would have to run flat out, and clip, which pushes a lot of energy into the HF drivers. Safer for the tweeters to have a more powerful amp which is not run into clipping, even if some peaks exceed the cabinet's rated power.

The VLC volume control has always terrified me, I wish it would have AGC or at least a soft limiter when pushed above 100%. I've seen people watch films with it cranked up to 200% and the system volume turned down to compensate :(
Which actions would those be?
The collapse of large nations is a Good Thing for the working class majority: the elite always want large nations, especially large nations with lots of racial, cultural and language divisions. That makes it easier for the elite to control the nation. It's called the 'divide et impera' strategy. That was the founding principle of the USA (see the letter from madison from jefferson wherein madison writes that the divide et impera (divide and rule) tactic is the way to rule america (madison was worth 100 mill in today's dollars when he got his inheritance; jefferson, almost the same)).

When the elite can no longer hold large, divided nations together via violence and or propaganda, the working class majority form smaller, more homogeneous, less divided nations, nations that can be more easily controlled by the workers, and less easily controlled by the elite.

Factions are the friend of the rich and the enemy of the masses.

How do the elite create factions so they can rule? Enlarge the nation; import foreigners, especially those of another race and culture; create propaganda that focuses on identity politics; etc etc.

Of course the centrally controlled dogma of the american edu-propaganda system has programmed us to feel bad about collapse of nations. Oh, it's so sad that such and such nation is breaking up.

But that is an elite-centric propaganda meme. It is always a good thing when nations collapse and fall apart--a good thing from the perspective of the working class majority. Of course the more "educated" you are, the more you take the perspective of the elite--in general.
Yet somehow they made F# and scala run on the CLR. So: I'm calling bullshit.
Missing gender articles for nouns in gendered languages makes this pretty useless for learning words.
VaDart – Vagrant box with Dart and a remote-enabled MySQL connection
This post offers a great checklist for avoiding the "build first" trap:

1. What problem is this actually solving, and for who?
2. How will I find and talk (face to face or on the phone) to at least
20 people whose problem this solves?
3. Does this idea have the potential to make £1,000 profit per month
within 3 months?
4. Would the business require me to be available 24/7 for support or be
pinned to one location?
5. Can I write 3-5 blog posts this week about solving the problem,
and imagine dong so for the next 6 months?
6. Do I really care about the outcomes of this business-–will that passion
be sufficient to get me through the hardest times?
It would be simpler to just make an editor which displays a { after any end-of-line colon and lines with } before each deindent, without actually adding them to the file.
I need to get out more, I thought this meant programming language... lol.
And how did that work? I'm just trying to imagine those first year students staring at those segmentation faults or trying to decipher some other non-intuitive C behaviour (promotion rules, = vs. ==, pointer arithmetics, various implicit rules). Talk about being thrown into the deep end of the pool to swim...

When a language like Pascal is taught as a first language students can focus on the mechanics of their algorithms rather than struggling with language oddities and machine architecture. I think that's important for new programmers to be able to focus on the flow and mechanics without worrying about other details. Once you get that you can "advance" to things that leak more of the underlying architecture into your program. There are probably many other languages that fit that bill.

EDIT (replying to jkrems): E.g. in C if(a=1) assigns 1 to a. I think some modern compilers at least warn on this but they didn't use to and it's perfectly legal. You can't do this in Pascal. You can still make a mistake but you'll get a compiler error. This is a very common mistake for beginners...
It's worth noting that pewdiepie has 22+ million subscribers. The flappy birds video[1] from January 27th already has 9+ million views.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQz6xhlOt18
I think everyone's wondering, why didn't he just book a trip to the beach and come back a month later when all the fuss had died down?
Since it is vote in a technical discussion, I wouldn't be so sure, until everybody voices their opinion. After all, insight into merits and flaws of each system may change.

And that's what technical (sub)committees are for.

PS I would vote for "further discussion" in a very Debian style.
Rise or Fall of Facebook
Indeed, .nethackrc is one of the first files I create on a new machine :)
There may be a culture, but Python is simply a tool. One doesn't need to be a "Pythonic thinker" to use that tool. I'm not saying this is the most /sensible/ idea/project, but I see nothing in particular wrong with it. Your conception of culture here sounds oppressive and stifling to me.

Another commenter suggests the only reason to do something like this would be "emotional attachment"; all the huffing and puffing in these comments strikes me as exactly that, but in reverse.
Anybody here tried this at all?

I tried to get a takeout with my emails several times, all I got is on 2.3MB errors.html, telling "service cannot retrieve this item" over and over again.
Where I live they recently installed some new intersections that are now sharp corners and they're now really dangerous for everyone. You need to go so slow to make the turns that nearly everyday I see accidents that are narrowly avoided. They don't "calm traffic" instead they just make it congested which means it's dangerous for people in cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians.
Hey, I will just say, I'm not the one who behind this project. This project belong to two people I familiar with.
Maybe I can arrange more "official" response from them about this project.
Though, I want to say, This discussion just prove one of the probable core concept of this project. You should have the ability to choose the syntax that is right for you. The language stays (pretty much) the same.

P.S. I don't program in Python at all. The last time I've programmed in Python was a few years ago, when 2.4 was fresh (and I would still claim I didn't even really programmed then). I think indention base syntax has its advantages and disadvantages. But it's not pure good.
Thank you for the duolingo link! I found my ultimate procrastination tool :)
It was you that's right, he has indeed been hell-banned.
Is there anyway to download using wget or curl? Google chrome isn't cutting mustard. After about 4 gigs, it gives me a fat error.
Persistent Aerial Surveillance: Do We Want To Go There, America?
Cryptographic Code Obfuscation...